Hi there and thank you. The short answer is yes to all of that. Should I take the discussion to another forum? I don't want to break any etiquette.

Also if you look in the credits on the manual they misspelled my name "Rhineheart" vs "Rhinehart" which I actually liked and let them leave it.

I just shared with someone via pm. One funny Suzuki-san story I have is that I dropped a VMU on his foot when I first met him. I was prepping to go on a trip across the country to demo the game for the press so I had about 10 VMUs with different save files I'd bring with me everywhere. I had to demo each save for him so he could approve of what I was showing. When I walked up to him to introduce myself, I dropped one of the 10 VMUs on his foot. I think the 4X memory card was still being tested at the time so I didn't have the luxury of using one of those. :)

I am more than happy to. Where should I move it? I can't recall if there was a distinct smell... you guys are so funny. I do recall that he commanded the room with silent wisdom. He is a great listener, and when he spoke everyone hung each and every single one of his words. Did anyone else on these forums work on the game? I have to say I had the greatest group of testers working under me on this. I had roughly 20 people and 20 of the smartest people I know. One of my testers was focused solely collecting all items from the vending machine. Also, when I thought we were done with the project and was feeling a sense of accomplishment, I got hit with working on the strategy guide. That was a huge project, but I think it turned out great.

Aside from dropping the VMU, here are a few other interesting tid bits. A lot of this is going off memory, which having been in the gaming industry now for 14 years, may not be 100 percent accurate.

1. The game was in full test for 8 months in the US (could have been longer, but that seems about right). We ran double shifts on the game when we were in crunch mode. That meant I was typically working from 7am-10pm overseeing both shifts of testers.
2. We first tested on de-bug versions of the game that would allow us to trigger events. Because events were time based a tester could not simply play through the game and see everything.
3. There were a fair amount of things that changed from the Japan version of the game for legal reasons as well as ESRB content. Coke, which I am sure you guys all know, was not cleared to appear in the US version of the game.
4. Sorry about the forklift bug. I wish I could have access to the bug database to see if that one was caught, but not addressed. Not all bugs we found would get addressed for time reasons and also often times, if it appeared in the Japan version of the game and didn't cause a huge stink, the dev team was not always willing to change it for the US version.
5. In the last week of testing, we came across a scene none of us had seen before. The significance of that was that technically by that point we should have seen everything. It was a rare event that I can't remember exactly how we were unable to trigger it, but it scared the crap out of everyone because it got us wondering what else we may have missed. If my memory serves me right, the content had either untranslated text or questionable content. I can't remember which.
6. We used to walk around the office saying "Hey mister, wanna wrestle?" all the time. That line was definitely in our top 10 favorites.
7. We used to call going to lunch on our breaks, going to the Tomato Store.
8. I think I mentioned this one before, but the Prima Guide for Shenmue ended up being almost as much work as testing the game. We had to go through and re-verify a ton of items and things that were being printed in the guide.

Okay questions for you guys:
1. Have you guys gotten all 1sts in the forklift races? We had a couple of testers that ended up getting really good at it.
2. What are your darts high scores?
3. How about Hang On and Space Harrier?
4. What are your thoughts on the Saturn being in Ryo's house even though the game technically took place in the 80s? (yes we bugged that) but I sure as heck did like playing games in it hanging out at home.
5. Do you guys think you have seen every scene by now?

Here is the poster I was talking about

I did put the poster up on ebay by the way... for anyone interested.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261322322097?ss ... 1423.l2649

Thank you for the forgiveness. I really appreciate the support. The funny thing is, months and many hours a day I still love the game like there is no tomorrow. You would think I would be over it after working on such a massive project. And let me tell you, as far as testing is concerned, it was by far the hardest of any game. ChuChu, PSO, NFL 2K1 (so many hours on NFL btw because of the online), and so many more titles just didn't compare to testing something like this. I would like to think that my team was part of the reason US Shenmue was released in Japan. The game was so much cleaner and more refined they felt the need to release our version in Japan. That never happened back then. I did stumble across some early and later proto versions of the game this week. I want to dig into them soon and see what surprises lurk.

So the poster... I may be downplaying the issues we had with the poster a bit. Yes, it is a strange and obviously rare thing. I wish I had a better memory. All I can recall is that there was a huge WTF moment when SOA (San Fran) saw what SOE had done. It wasn't a pretty discussion.


That poster confuses me. Did they literally just wholesale steal artwork from Enter the Dragon, and stick Shenmue underneath that? I far as I can tell that's what it is. Why on earth would anyone at Sega (or anyone in the world) think that was good idea. lol. Still, it's a very nice and unique item for the Shenmue collectors out there. I've now changed my mind (sorry LGS, sorry Marina), Rhino for member of the month! I'm actually gonna PM qwerty (something I thought I'd never do) my vote that's how much I'm rating you bruh.

P.S I forgive you for your lack of diligence in finding the forklift bug :P