When Shenmue III was initially announced during E3 2015’s Sony Conference, fans immediately began to hope for remastered re-releases of the first two Shenmue games. Considering the difficulty of acquiring the two games at the current time, and as a means to boost the profile of the Shenmue franchise ahead of the long-awaited third title’s release, it was an oft-made suggestion.
Recent news of certain website domains being registered offers some hope in this direction. Initially, TSSZNews.com broke news of the registering of shenmuehd.com. Additionally, Shenmue Dojo noticed the registering of shenmueremastered.com. These two URLs, alongside a shenmuegame.com (which redirects you to YSNet’s Kickstarter page), were referenced in SEGABits‘ article on the domain name registrations; their article also includes a reference to a reversewhois page from sega.co.uk – which was used to register these URLs. But if you try to visit the URLs now, you’ll be taken to blank webpages.
As Gematsu notes in response to a SEGA Central community issues discussion video made during May of last year, SEGA has previously mentioned interest in exploring options to bring Shenmue to current gaming consoles.
The news of these two domain names being registered offers hope to the prospects of the Shenmue and Shenmue II re-releases! Let us hope that the games do come to fruition.
If that’s actually coming, they better work with Suzuki to time those right with Shenmue 3 release, I’ve always thought a rerelease of Shenmue 1&2 would actually diminish interest in 3, unless they were released together (or they make a heck of a remake, which they will provably not do).
Worst of my fears, people buying a cheap port of a very old and archaic game, never finishing the game, and never buying Shenmue 3, which means there is no money to work on Shenmue 4…