A few days back we brought word of the online PC social game of Shenmue Town. A game we still don’t know an awful lot about. Someone who does though is series composer Osamu Murata, who’s not only friends with series creator Yu Suzuki but also the chaps behind this curious installment at Yahoo! Mobage.
A smattering of twitters highlight how conflicted the composer is regarding the project, the majority of which you’ll find at the source below, and its actually a genuinely depressing read. He writes;
There was no compromise for quality in Shenmue, and if there was compromise, Yu would get extremely angry as us. It was by being tossed around by this that the creativity of my current self was born. When I think about the the current state of Sega and Yu that required Shenmue to become a light game, I have complicated feelings
We’ve joked about things like ‘The Sonic Cycle’ in the past, but in doing so it’s easy to forget that there are a lot of people to whom these were personal projects, and you can really tell just how much Shenmue meant to Osamu Murata. There does seem to be some confusion as to how official a project this is, as there still doesn’t seem to be any word from Sega on the game’s existence (Currently I don’t know if the actual title is Town or City). Although personally I can’t decide between an online social game or a fork-lift driver in a kart racer as the worst swan song for one of the most important Dreamcast franchises for Sega. Here’s hoping for more information on the project very soon.
[Source: Andriasang]
