Shopping Guide
**”I really don’t play games.”**
TOM: A while ago you mentioned that you don’t really play games. Is that true?
S: I really don’t play games (laughs). I want to express the things outside games that I find intriguing inside games. Since my job is making games, I import things from outside games that no one has expressed in a game before, and express it through cooking up my own cuisine in the world of the game. Once the subject is decided, I do a lot of research on it.
TOM: Why is it that you don’t play games?
S: For instance, when we go to a game parlor, my friends are always better than me. It’s no fun when you always go home as the loser. Although in a game parlor, I might be fifth out of five, but when it comes to driving a real car, I enjoy it because I’m the faster one (laughs). This factor makes up the basis of fun. You just won’t enjoy doing something you lose at all the time, which is why I enjoy driving a real car or bike more. It’s not like I don’t like games, but to me, there are many things I can have more fun with, so I use my time for those instead.
TOM: There are a variety of games in the world, aren’t you interested in them?
S: Not really. Not playing games isn’t a minus for me. Since I’m a creator, I put great importance on originality. And since I don’t check out other games, I won’t end up making something similar. However, when we included video productions in Shenmue, we were using real-time CG to create these cinematic presentations. In order to be able to do that, I would not only watch but thoroughly analyze one movie a day for a period even when times were tight.
TOM: Unrelated to games, what movies do you like?
S: My three favorite movies are Roman Holiday (1953), Casablanca (1942), and Hustler (1961). In terms of direction, older movies aren’t as hurried compared to modern ones.
TOM: What else did you use as reference for Shenmue 1 and 2 besides movies?
S: Since Shenmue has a lot of components, it’s hard to specify. For the Virtua Fighter series, I immersed myself in studying kempo. When designing Out Run, I would often drive and I even rode a motorbike around, so badly that I ended up injuring myself (laughs). During the making of After Burner, I studied so hard I was almost like a military maniac. Shenmue is where I comprehensively used all that knowledge. The components of Shenmue include bikes, bicycles, and even street fighting. I put in all the know-how I acquired until that time.
When making Shenmue, I went to China to collect information and put my strength into a challenge I’ve only faced in Shenmue: automatic creation.
TOM: As in automatic programming.
S: Yes. Had we tried the human wave approach, no budget would have been enough, so we came up with a way to cover for it with programming instead. For instance, we configured it so that the game could make snow or rain fall, automatically change the weather, or alter the water of rivers, lakes, and even waterfalls, all with calculation formulas in real time, using only simple data. Character movement is also controlled with AI. This way, we could decrease the amount of budget spent on human resources, raising cost-performance ratio.
TOM: Now that you mention it, even conversations vary in Shenmue.
S: For the speech in Shenmue, we came up with a way to implement a language process. Patterned dialogues aren’t interesting, so we disassembled speech to components such as subject and predicate, and prepared a few words for each. By combining these elements, you can rapidly increase the number of speech patterns. It is made in such a construction, which is why it feels as if you’d get a different answer each time you ask the same character. If we hadn’t come up with this method, back in the time of CDs and GD-ROMs, it probably would have taken 50 discs or so for just one game (laughs).
Rooms are also created through automatic programming. We call them “magic rooms.” When we were making Kowloon Walled City, I wanted to put everything in the rooms we made. There were thousands of rooms, and I wanted all of them to be free to roam. The designer told me it was impossible, so I thought there was no use in entrusting that task to him (laughs), and that’s when I thought, we could just make the program create them itself.
If you use automatic programming, you can create 1,200 rooms in roughly 4/10,000th of a second. In other words, let’s assume Ryo wants to enter a room in Kowloon Walled City and opens the door. Until that time, there was nothing in that room, but then the door opens and a room will be complete in the 1/60th of a second in which the scene changes into the room. This way, we can create an infinite number of rooms, it doesn’t matter even if there are tens of thousands. We create forests in the exact same way. This is now called an open world. Various components are combined to raise the degree of freedom.
“I’m grateful to the creators who make open world games”
TOM: Ever since the 1999 release of Shenmue, a great number of open world games have appeared on the market. What do you think about them now?
S: When Shenmue was released, we didn’t use the term “open world.” At the time, digging deep into multiple subjects at the same time would have caused imbalances in the budget, so delving into one subject at a time was mostly common sense. The reason for that is that if you divide 10 resources for 10 subjects, you can only get a performance ratio of one. However, if you put 10 resources to one subject, you can dig 10 times deeper, achieving an accordingly higher performance, and this is why games at the time shared the theory of delving deeper into just a few themes. However, by applying the above-mentioned automatic programming method, you can raise the performance per subject above one, which disproves this theory.
TOM: This way, the program covers for human costs.
S: Exactly. For instance, even if it’s made with few resources, if you can get good performance by making free use of the program, you can make it possible to enjoy a taste of 10 different themes in one game. Taking the army knife used on mountains as an example, there was a theory stating that since all of its available functions are crude, you would be better off having just one knife. But the improvement of technology caused all the qualities of the knife to improve, thus prompting a change in our sense of value. This is a similar situation. Shenmue was the first in the game industry to have crossed that boundary of values.
At that time, I said, “Let’s improve the degree of freedom and increase the number of options,” and I often used the word “free” as opposed to “open world.” At some point, “free” became “open world,” and putting aside whether it’s the same thing with what I had in mind, the genre for which Shenmue had first set in motion expanded, and games such as the Grand Theft Auto series appeared on the world market. I was told by many game creators, “We were able to create an open world game thanks to Shenmue,” and, “It influenced me, thank you,” so not only I am happy to have made it, I am also immensely grateful to everyone who helped in expanding the concept of Shenmue.
TOM: As the protagonist of such an open world game, what does Ryo Hazuki from Shenmue mean to you?
S: That’s a difficult question… Since I only made arcade games until then, I had no experience in making RPGs, where play time is unrestrained, before Shenmue, which is why I felt that making everything from scratch would be too much. Then it occurred to me that it would be easier if I made something like a spin-off with the popularity and resources of Virtua Fighter, so I started making it with a Virtua Fighter RPG in mind. But somewhere along the way, I thought I could rise to the challenge with a combination of a new brand and new software to go with the new hardware, so I changed the protagonist to Ryo. In that sense, Ryo originally comes from Akira Yuki. Now, Akira has turned from polygons into a considerably handsome man in Virtua Fighter. Akira, too, has primary school years, turns from boy to young man, and grows as he meets various people along the way. During the discovery of his friends, he also discovers himself.
Shenmue’s Ryo is also depicted—with an emphasis on being realistic—as a character on the journey of growing to adulthood, so I’d like gamers to try comparing him with their past selves a little, see if you have something in common. If you’re not similar, try to enjoy the differences, I’d be happy if using him like that as your mirror would invoke some feelings in you. I’m not sure if this qualifies as an answer, though (laughs). I think you will discover a different side of Ryo in Shenmue 3. Please look forward to the release!
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This is a Tokyo Otaku Mode original article.Written by Kohji Sakurai, photo by Hara Tetsuya.