Shenmue is a game with a reputation—both good and bad. It was, for a while, the most expensive videogame ever made. It sold less than Sega expected, and may have contributed to the sad death of the Dreamcast. To some it's an idiosyncratic, highly ambitious masterpiece. To others it's slow, boring, and barely playable. And, until this 2018 re-release, the only way to play the first game was on a Dreamcast. Or an emulator, I suppose, but it was mostly a miserable experience, with graphical glitches and poor performance.

Of those two camps, I'm of the opinion that, for all its faults, Shenmue is a masterpiece. A singular game with a bold vision, and one of the most powerfully atmospheric things I've ever played—blocky geometry, weird controls, and all. Replaying it this year, at 4K with anti-aliasing and some neat bloom lighting effects, I felt the same way I did the first time I first booted it up. I was swept up in the melodramatic martial arts adventure of Ryo Hazuki, and beguiled by the game's vision of Japan in the '80s.

A remake might have been nice, but I'm happy with the fact that, in the remaster, it looks just like it did on Dreamcast—albeit a little sharper around the edges. Well, smoother if you count the AA. Yokosuka is as captivating as ever: a beautiful, quiet, often gloomy slice of suburban Japan, with overcast skies, sleepy backstreets, and wintry weather. It's the perfect backdrop for the game's melancholy storyline of hopeless revenge and unrequited love.

One of the most refreshing things about playing Shenmue today is how wilfully, glacially paced it is. This is an incredibly slow game, and part of the reason why so many critics bounce off it. But it's a perfect fit for the life of a teenager stuck in a small town, and when you're not chasing your father's killer, there's something magical about how mundane life can be. Shopping at the convenience store. Talking to the neighbours. Feeding the cat. Shenmue is happy to just let you be, and not enough games allow that these days.

I also love how familiar you become with the setting over time, and how it begins to feel like home. Because every NPC in the game has a routine, you start to become aware of peoples' lives. A person might go to a certain restaurant for lunch every day, or a shopkeeper will catch the bus home after pulling the shutters down on his store. This creates an incredible sense of place and community, and the feeling that this world exists without you. It's remarkable how such an old game can create this sensation, and so strongly.

The second game is fine. I don't love it, but it's worth playing in preparation for Shenmue III. The sequel loses something in its increased scale, replacing the relatively small area of Yokosuka with the sprawling mass of Hong Kong—and other parts of China besides. But the first game works as a standalone experience, I think, and is worth buying this collection for. I won't be getting rid of the Dreamcast that's sat dutifully under my TV for the past decade, but now whenever I want to replay Shenmue (and that's often), I'm glad I can just fire it up on Steam now.

D3T is the UK studio behind the recent re-release of Shemue I & II on PC. It's a quality port, and the games hold up surprisingly well at high resolutions. But how do you go about getting a 20-year-old console game to run on modern hardware? I asked tech director Noel Austin about the process.

PC Gamer: Why do you think people still love Shenmue?Noel Austin: The love and passion that went into the original is clear. The team cared so deeply about the player experience, and it has rightly reached cult status. The controls and some of the mechanics seem clunky nowadays, but so many aspects of the game were groundbreaking at the time.The world is incredibly detailed and well researched. Shenmue really gives the feel of living in Yokosuka in the late 1980s. There is very little hand holding. The player is expected to find their way around using maps and talking to people, which is quite refreshing in this modern age of constant objective markers.

When did you start work on the project?

We first took possession of the Shenmue archive back in October 2015. Ramp up was slow while we picked through the massive data archive and planned the approach we would take to porting the project. Over the lifetime of the project, probably at least 20 people have touched the code, although the peak team size was probably around 10 developers.This project has been way more difficult than we ever expected and has been a real labour of love for the core team. We feel passionate about the game and we’re over the moon with the positive feedback we’ve received.

Was bringing a 20-year-old game to modern PCs difficult?

Incredibly difficult! At D3T we have worked on some very challenging projects, but this was by far the toughest. For example, there was no source code for the Dreamcast libraries, but luckily the Shenmue 2 Xbox version had source for the ported Xbox libraries.

It was definitely not  a case of dropping the Xbox libraries in and building Shenmue, but it gave us a good starting point. Even with that there were still many files missing which we had to reverse engineer from assembly code.

The Dreamcast and Xbox had 32-bit processors, but PS4 and Xbox One are 64-bit. This has a big implication with how memory and data are handled. It was a massive engineering effort to convert the code and resulted in many obvious and many subtle bugs, some of which were still being found close to release.

Working on a Japanese-developed game must’ve been tricky too...

The original code was written by Japanese developers, so all the comments are in Japanese. We used Google Translate a lot to try and get a handle on what the code was doing, but it’s often not clear. Shenmue 1 had the additional problem for us that the game logic was written in a separate scripting language and ALL the function names and variables were in Japanese too!

Interestingly, we found that once the resolution was increased existing bugs became more apparent. There’s also the issue of widescreen, with the game being designed to run in a 4:3 ratio. This meant many of the cutscenes didn’t work correctly, so we had to add black bars at the sides.

The original games were technical marvels and they were highly tuned for the specific hardware platforms, which didn’t give us as much performance headroom as we were expecting, given their age.

Were there any quirks of the Dreamcast hardware that made getting the first game working on PC especially difficult?

The Dreamcast hardware had some features which would prove difficult to emulate, particularly the audio and graphics systems.

The audio on the Dreamcast is mainly driven by a completely different chip to the main CPU. This chip is loaded with different programs defined by the original developer, specifying things such as loop points, reverb, volumes, envelopes, etc. We didn’t have the source data for this, which meant a lot of reverse engineering to get it sounding okay.

Regarding the graphics, the Dreamcast GPU had some powerful and unique features not found on modern cards. The two features which caused us the most headaches were the modifier volumes used for shadows and light volumes, and the ability to sort transparent geometry on a per pixel level. The lack of modifier volumes on our target platforms led us to use a hybrid stencil shadow approach similar to the Xbox version of Shenmue 2. This is different to the original and artefacts can occasionally be seen because of this.

Shenmue has a crazy passionate fan community. Did you consult with any hardcore fans during the project?

We spent a lot of time looking through fan sites and forums to collect information. In fact, they were incredibly useful. Special thanks to Shenmue Dojo and Shenmue Translation Pack in particular, as well as the many community members who have made modding tools public domain.

You must have felt a lot of pressure being in charge of re-releasing such a beloved series of games...

The pressure was immense, both from the expectation of the community and the importance of Shenmue as a brand within Sega. We know how passionate the community is about the series, and rightly so. The community worked very hard in pushing for these re-releases and we’re very grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on such iconic games. I hope that the fans can get some understanding of the difficulties in resurrecting these titles, and that the new features we’ve added have been positive additions to the games. On a personal level I am still amazed that a game I played so many years ago is now available in full HD on my console at home!

Did you find anything interesting in the source code?

The moon in Shenmue 2 is not a texture. It’s an actual 3D object in the distance correctly lit by the sun direction. This produces accurate phases. We were surprised by this level of detail! The Lucky Hit games adjust the physical behaviour of the ball based on the weather and temperature, calculated by the time of day. For cutscenes, the game switches to high definition heads and hands, which allow for more expression. In Shenmue 1 the game logic is all written in a scripting language. For Shenmue 2 they got rid of it and wrote the logic in C code directly.

Did you look into remastering extras such as the ‘What’s Shenmue?’ pre-order demo or the Shenmue Passport disc?

We did investigate the feasibility of porting these, but were unable to find the complete source code for these extra components.

One of the many things I love about Shenmue is the feeling that the world exists without you. The people you see around you in Yokosuka aren’t just randomly generated NPCs wandering the streets aimlessly: they have routines, personalities, friends, places to be, and homes to go to.

In the morning you’ll see business owners arrive in Dobuita to start their working day. Then, in the evening, pulling the shutters down and making their way back home. Local biker Koji Yabe splits his time between playing games in the arcade, tuning his motorcycle, and eating burgers. Yoko Minato, a hostess, spends her days shopping in town before heading over to Bar Yokosuka in the evening to ply her trade. Your loyal live-in housekeeper Ine-san prays each night at the altar in the Hazuki residence before retiring to her bedroom.

These are simple routines, but combined they give each area of Yokosuka, from the high street to the suburbs, a palpable feeling of being alive, and a sense of community. There’s something nice about walking past Funny Bear Burger in the afternoon and seeing Ryuji Tatsumi from the thrift store there, as always, eating his lunch. Or knowing that Nozomi will be standing outside her grandmother’s flower shop every day. It creates a kind of cosy familiarity with the setting that I’ve never encountered in another videogame.

But there’s more. The original Dreamcast version of the game came with a fourth disc called Shenmue Passport that made use of the console’s built-in internet connectivity. This would let you submit your best minigame scores to an online leaderboard, unlock rare capsule toys, rewatch cutscenes, and more. But for me the best feature was the character viewer, which provided a backstory for every single NPC in the game, no matter how minor. Sega shut the Passport servers down in April 2002, but luckily these biographies were printed and preserved in the game’s official Prima strategy guide.

You’ve probably seen Yoshikazu Takahashi walking through Dobuita before, but never paid him any attention. He’s one of the many middle-aged salarymen who walk up and down the street every day. But when you read his heartbreaking backstory, you’ll never look at him in the same way again. His company went bankrupt, yet he continues to wear a suit, carry a briefcase, and leave for work every morning, because he can’t face telling his wife and children about it. They think he’s at the office, but really he’s wandering the streets of Dobuita, killing time, trying to build up the courage to tell them.

Some stories are more pleasant. Akio Enoki is a high school bully who regularly hassles Ryo, but there’s more to this cocky, grass-chewing delinquent than you might think. At night, making sure no one sees him, he visits the shrine in Yamanose and feeds Megumi’s orphaned kitten. Daisuke Ono is a member of the Mad Angels, a biker gang that Ryo has several run-ins with, but he only joined out of peer pressure. He wants to quit, but he’s too scared, and every day he regrets his decision to join. I love the idea of these bullies, tough guys, and criminals secretly being sad and conflicted about the life they’ve chosen, or revealing a softer side when nobody’s watching. It’s wonderfully human.

Other NPCs with interesting backstories include Cathy Wilkins, a red-haired woman who walks the streets of Dobuita at night. She’s secretly a military police officer with the United States Seventh Fleet, which is based in New Yokosuka Harbour. While it might look like she’s on a bar crawl, she’s actually making sure the sailors on shore leave in the city are behaving themselves. Rumiko Ishiwatari is on a similarly covert mission, appearing to most as a harmless housewife, but actually spying on Nagai Industries—a local yakuza organisation—for the Yokosuka police. And you know the guy dressed as Santa who appears in town around Christmas? He used to be a champion marathon runner, which is why he can stay on his feet all day. Of course.

The problem with these stories is that, unless you managed to access the Passport disc before the servers shut down, or read the strategy guide, you’d never know they existed. Some random lines of dialogue do seem to reference them, suggesting they weren’t simply written after the fact, but it would have been nice to see more of these details emerge in the game itself. This was almost twenty years ago, however, when videogame stories were still largely told through cutscenes and walls of text, so I can forgive Sega for not going further with it. If you’ve taken the recent re-release as an opportunity to play Shenmue for the first time, I recommend reading them, because it really does change your perception of Yokosuka and its citizens.

There are hundreds of NPCs in Shenmue, and I love that someone decided to give them all backstories—including the animals. Megumi’s kitten has a longer biography than some of the humans. But this ambition and attention to detail is precisely what makes Shenmue such a special, singular game. Developers boast about ‘living, breathing worlds’ all the time, but rarely deliver. Almost two decades later, Yokosuka remains one of the most believable virtual worlds ever built, because the people who inhabit it are more than just set dressing to give the impression of a bustling city: they’re an intrinsic part of how it functions.

Which makes the moment you have to leave for Hong Kong all the more unbearable. The game immerses you in the grounded escapism of Ryo’s teenage life to the point where Yokosuka starts to feel like home. There’s something comforting about seeing these people every day, watching them going about their daily lives, getting to know them. And then, suddenly, you’re forced to leave it all behind. As I highlighted in my review, Shenmue is an incredibly melancholy game, and the last few hours—knowing you’ll soon be saying goodbye to this quiet, snowy, beautiful place—is when the downbeat atmosphere hits hardest. A feeling given weight by the fact that Ryo’s driven, single-minded quest for vengeance is, fundamentally, stupid and reckless.

Considering you spend the majority of Shenmue asking people questions, following a seemingly endless breadcrumb trail of clues, it makes sense that Sega would go to such great lengths to bring its characters to life. I love Yakuza, considered by many to be a spiritual successor to Shenmue, but the crowds of pedestrians who clog the streets of Kamurocho and Sotenbori feel so faceless and machine-generated compared to the people of Yokosuka. This kind of simulation is probably enormously expensive and difficult to build, especially to a modern standard. But it’s the reason why, despite the visuals undeniably showing their age, Shenmue still boasts one of the most immersive, atmospheric, and believable settings you can explore on PC today.