Shenmue

Suzuki had built Sega's arcade reputation with Hang-On, Out Run and Virtua Fighter, games meant to be over in minutes, and wanted to make something long. In 1996 his AM2 team began a Saturn role-playing game set in the Virtua Fighter world, starring Akira. When the Saturn graphics add-on it needed was cancelled in 1997, the project moved to the coming Dreamcast; in 1998 the Virtua Fighter connection was dropped, the working title became Project Berkley, and Sega announced that the finished game belonged to a new genre it called "full reactive eyes entertainment," or FREE.

The setting was modeled on Dobuita in Yokosuka. The team worked with interior decorators on more than 1,200 rooms, created over 300 characters with names, schedules and relationships, and generated the weather from Yokosuka's actual 1986 meteorological records. Ryo could play full versions of Hang-On and Space Harrier in the arcade between shifts driving a forklift at the harbor. At one point the team was tracking more than 10,000 unresolved bugs in Excel spreadsheets; when characters got stuck inside a convenience store, Suzuki's fix was to widen the door. At Suzuki's insistence the English voices were recorded in Japan, which left the localizer hiring nearly everyone there who called themselves a voice actor. The cost was reported at $70 million, the most for any game to that point; Suzuki later put it nearer $47 million including marketing, some of it covering Shenmue II.

It arrived in Japan on December 29, 1999 and in North America on November 7, 2000. Critics split on the pace: Edge called it "a game of middle management," and Game Informer wrote that the experience already existed and "It's called life." GameSpot named it both the most disappointing console game of 2000 and the year's best technical graphics. It sold 260,000 copies in its first week in Japan and 1.2 million overall, one of the Dreamcast's best sellers, which was nowhere near enough; by GamesRadar's arithmetic every Dreamcast owner would have had to buy it twice. Shenmue II lost money too, and Suzuki left Sega in 2011.

The game is credited with naming and popularizing the quick-time event, and 1UP called it the original open-world city game, before Grand Theft Auto III. In 2015 Suzuki's Kickstarter for Shenmue III hit its $2 million goal in under nine hours and closed at $6.3 million; the game shipped in 2019 and an anime followed in 2022. In a 2025 BAFTA public poll, Shenmue was voted the most influential video game of all time.