In development, Shenmue chapter one was originally going to have Ryo riding a bike for faster transport around town.
The song that plays in chapter one when Ryo is riding the motorbike to the harbour to rescue Nozomi is also used in one of Yu Suzuki's other games, F355 Challenge. In F355 Challenge it appears complete with vocals which weren't in Shenmue.
Apparantely, Naoyuki Ito, Ryo's friend in Yokosuka, smokes, but this was taken out of the English language release. You can tell that he is meant to be holding one but it was removed, especially when he sits down in Suzume Park.
The design for Chen Gui Zhang was based on an alternative outfit for Lan Di, in which he wears a suit, presumably for when conducting his business deals. I guess the lack of scenes with Lan Di in meant that this design was not needed, so instead it evolved to become the character we know as Gui Zhang. This explains the similarity between the looks of the characters.
Shenmue was originally set to be an epic story comprising 16 chapters and released over many games. The first game for release on Dreamcast was meant to include the first few chapters over 4 discs. However, as more and more detail was added to the game, AM2 realised that this would make a massive first game, and instead concentrated on the first chapter. Hence the original Shenmue contains just Chapter One: Yokosuka. Shenmue II contains chapters 2 through 4, although it is unknown whether we are still halfway through chapter 4 or not.
Shenmue bizarrely appeared on the front cover of American magazine "TV Guide".
In the original Shenmue, if you are working on the harbour job on disc 3, on Christmas day, the boss gives you double pay.
In the You Arcade in Dobuita, the top scorer on the Hang On game is Ren, but Ren only appears in later chapters in the next game in the series.
Yuan, the woman enemy that opposes Ryo and Ren in Shenmue II, has a different voice actor in the English version of the game. In the Japanese original she is a transvestite, with the voice acted by a man putting on a high voice. For the English release, this was changed to a woman's voice.
Shenmue II was originally going to start with scenes or even gameplay elements showing Ryo's journey on Hong Kong on the boat. This didn't make it into the final game as it would take a huge amount of time designing all new environments for bits which doesn't progress the story. However, the it's influence can be seen at the start of Shenmue II, where a woman and her child thank Ryo for helping out the young child on the boat. What Ryo did we do not know. Update: The Official Manga shows what happened on the ship with the girl.
It is widely known that Shenmue was originally rumoured to be a Virtua Fighter RPG and the free battle uses an altered version of the Virtua Fighter 3 engine. However, many of the game's characters fighting styles are based off Virtua Fighter Characters:
Shenmue Ryo Hazuki Chai Rod Stunt Greg Moore Chunyan Baihu Izumi Irene
Virtua Fighter Akira Leon Jeffry Wolf Sarah Lau Sarah Pai
In the "What's Shenmue" playable demo, you can make Ryo crouch down by pressing X. This, as you know, was scrapped from the final version, probably because it has no gameplay use.
As you know, all Shenmue toys were transferred to Shenmue II, although a few didn't make the cut. Amongst these are the 4 toys which featured Sega consoles: "Dreamcasko", "Sataro", "Megadra Brother", and "Gear-O". These were probably removed because of Sega's decision to get out of the console hardware market and also due to the game's forthcoming appearance on Microsoft's X-Box console.
Shenmue is in the Guinness Book of Records. It's entry is under the most expensive videogame to produce in the world. Unfortunately I do not know the exact figure, but what is quoted in the book is much less than the amount that was actually spent on Shenmue by Sega at that time, probably due to much development having already been done for Shenmue II, which was not used in Shenmue I.
Hong Xiuying is the only character to have more than one outfit/costume in-game. She has one outfit for when she is inside and one for outside. The inside one is a basic brown outfit, but the outside one is an elegant full-length blue dress. Although there are huge amounts of promotional pictures showing Ling Shenhua in different outfits (and even riding a horse), in-game, she has always been in the same one.
Sega changed the name of Cool-J, the member of the Heavens gang with the boombox, to Cool-J for the European release because they were worried about the similarity in name with the rapper LL Cool J, especially as the character was also involved with music.
Pre-orders for Shenmue Chapter One in Japan exceeded 100,000 copies from one retailer, Sega's own D-Direct alone. The game has since sold over 1,200,000 copies worldwide.
In Japan, Sega had to issue a warning to Shenmue users not to phone the telephone numbers used in the game in real life. This is because the number of phone calls recieved by these numbers went up by a huge amount, and the people complained to Sega. It seems that Shenmue was so realistic, it used real area codes and phone numbers and fans in Japan had tried to phone the numbers to see who was there in real life or if it was an official Sega phoneline.
In development, Shenmue chapter one was originally going to have Ryo riding a bike for faster transport around town.
Shenmue bizarrely appeared on the front cover of American magazine "TV Guide".