E3 2015: ‘Shenmue III’ Kickstarter is Already Halfway Funded

Shenmue lives. I cried in front of my computer screen.

In one of the most stunning announcements at Sony’s E3 — an E3 that includes The Last Guardian and a remake of Final Fantasy VII — Yu Suzuki took to the stage of Sony’s conference to announce Shenmue III is in development!

With a Kickstarter.

The shock of legitimate evidence of Shenmue III presenting itself to my eyeballs is still clouding me, but there are some muddy ownership stuff going on here. Shenmue was originally released for the Sega Dreamcast and Shenmue II was released for the original Xbox (North America).

And here I thought Suzuki’s tweet from a few days ago was just a cruel tease.

E3で見つけた。 pic.twitter.com/Ku5CH7v6kU

— Yu Suzuki (@yu_suzuki_jp) June 14, 2015

I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, Shenmue III is fucking happening and the Kickstarter, live for maybe less than the runtime of all three Hobbit movies by now, is already more than halfway to its $2 million goal (there are 31 days total for the Kickstarter to run).

But Sony’s involvement confuses me. Did Sony buy the IP? Why let them announce a hotly-anticipated title has entered development with a Kickstarter, a plea to give us goddamn money, on an E3 stage if they didn’t have such exclusivity? Even if Shenmue III is funded with enough money to end poverty in a third-world nation, the game is still set to launch on the PlayStation 4 and the PC with zero mention of any other console, Xbox or otherwise, anywhere.

At this point I’ll take Shenmue III on a LeapFrog, but I would like to know exactly what happened between creator Yu Suzuki and any relationship he had, if at all, with the folks at Microsoft.