After almost two decades, modders have found a hidden move in the original Shenmue’s code.
Shenmue has gained an almost mythical status for being an entirely quirky, strange game where you can both engage in martial arts fisticuffs and then gamble on a duck race. No, we’re not kidding about that: there is actual duck racing in Shenmue’s fictional Yokosuka harbor.
The game originally came out for the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast way back in the heady days of 1999. At the time, it was the most expensive game ever developed and featured groundbreaking cutscenes and almost laughably bad voice acting (but almost any voice acting would have been groundbreaking for the era).
While the game gained a cult following, it was a commercial flop. Developer Ys Net somehow managed to convince Sega to make a sequel in 2001, but then Sega tanked and the third installment was thrown into development limbo.
Until 2015, where a successful Kickstarter campaign--then the world’s most successful game crowd fundraiser--brought Shenmue III back from the dead to eventually see a release date of November 18th of this year.
But back to the original Shenmue, where modders are still discovering new things to do in the game’s strange world even two decades later. By digging through the code, folks found out that there was a special hidden move that had been included in the game's files but was permanently disabled.
The move is called “Shin Shōryūken,” a nod to Street Fighter and Ryu’s Dragon Punch. The move has all the same style, but sadly none of the flames. Shenmue is too realistic for that sort of nonsense.
PhantomRiverStone.com tells the story on this hidden easter egg. Apparently, the developers wanted to include the move in the base game but were forced to remove it at the last second by director Yu Suzuki. Rather than remove it, the developers merely disabled it, meaning that somebody could just come along and reactivate it provided they had a bit of knowledge of ancient Sega Dreamcast code.
Modder nullpo then turned it into a mod for download on Shenmue Dojo, which allows anyone to download it and install it for the PC version of the game, which was released for Windows in 2018. The move is unlocked in the brief quick-time event fight against greaser thug Goro, who gets knocked on his butt Ryu-style.
Shenmue III recently got a November 18th release date announced at this year’s E3 festivities, so this new discovery has some pretty great timing.
(via Eurogamer)