Why was the ridable Bike cut from Shenmue 1?

[Zoltor]

I see they had even built a bike shed in Dobuita where Ryo could leave his bike.


By the way, listening to Yu's words in the GDC video, he says "I wanted to put it (the bicycle) into Shenmue, but we ran into various problems and gave up on it". So he was just a touch more specific than the interpreter's version.

Ok, wonder what those problems were, hm.

[Kiske]

Interacting with other people, objects... transition from one area to another? Who knows?
Would have been nice to be able to participate in bike races in the Harbor area though...

[SMDzero]

i think the answer was that there was no real practical purpose to the bike. the environments were small enough to run around comfortably.

perhaps the open spaces in the harbor could have justified a bike... but the point of shenmue is to take it slow and not speed around.

[ShenGCH]

The bike was simply a gameplay gimmick in my opinion, and a quite troublesome and unnecessary one at that. As some of the community have pointed out, what would happen if you decided to just leave the bike there in the middle of the street? It's not like in Pokémon where the bike can seemingly be stored in your pocket or something. With the amount of people walking through Dobuita at any one time, navigating through the streets with the bike mightn't have been the smoothest ride (no pun intended) either. If NPCs getting in the way posed a problem for smooth navigation with the bike, surely just some of the solutions would be to either reduce the number of them on the street at any one time, to have them move out of the way long before reaching them, or to do something to the collision so that getting really close to them 'pushes' them to the side. Just sounds like more problems than benefits.

What about when you unlock the ability to go to the harbour: would Ryo ride the bike all the way there (with a black screen transition in-between) or would he say, "I should leave this here," before dismounting the moment he touches the boundary between Dobuita street and the road? If it's the latter, would he really just leave the bike there in the middle of the street like that?

I have to admit, it would probably work quite well for navigating the harbour, but even so, would it really make all that much of a difference compared to running, especially when running offers so much more control and roughly the same top speed over a bike?

Nothing against those who are working hard to mod the bike back into the game - I seriously admire your dedication and love for the game - but it's something I could never see myself using if it were left in the game. Everyone loves a good run through Dobuita

[Zoltor]

To ShenGCH: Um actually now that you bring it up, why can't Ryo just put it in his back pocket? Lord knows he shoves everything else in there lol.

Lol now that would be funny, if you could ride it all the way to the harbor(look how long the motorcycle part takes, imagine if it took like 5-10 times longer to get to the harbor, because a bike is so much slower. Perhaps if the bus broke down, and he had to ride to his job as fast as possible, because if he's late, he'll get in trouble from his boss.


Don't get me wrong, I love the game without the Bike, and I don't think having the bike would add anything to the game, I was just wondering why it was cut, when it seems to have been pretty much ready to go, that's all. Also I'm not one of the people working on the mod.

[ShenGCH]

To ShenGCH: Um actually now that you bring it up, why can't Ryo just put it in his back pocket? Lord knows he shoves everything else in there lol.

Lol now that would be funny, if you could ride it all the way to the harbor(look how long the motorcycle part takes, imagine if it took like 5-10 times longer to get to the harbor, because a bike is so much slower. Perhaps if the bus broke down, and he had to ride to his job as fast as possible, because if he's late, he'll get in trouble from his boss.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game without the Bike, and I don't think having the bike would add anything to the game, I was just wondering why it was cut, when it seems to have been pretty much ready to go, that's all. Also I'm not one of the people working on the mod.

Ha! Yeah, Ryo does appear to have a lot of room in those pockets of his. Unfortunately, the time-space continuum would probably split down the middle if Ryo tried shoving a bike in there amongst the dozens of capsule toys, bars of SEGA chocolate, and cassette tapes

[drunkensailor]

if you want to ride on a bike in shenmue play what's shenmue and it also works very well

[FlagshipFighter]

I read somewhere that it was a RAM-intensive feature and it was cut as part of improving performance.

Personally, I think the game plays fine without anything like that as the maps aren't huge and I'd imagine transportation like that would interrupt the flow of the game, especially regarding the frequent loading/fading to black.

I mean, forklifts do play well when racing, but it's really finiky when doing the job as all those npc's get in the way sometimes. I can only imagine a bike wouldn't help much...

@shengoro sounds good, would be interesting to see if it ever could be implemented :-)

[Spaghetti]

I imagine it must have been a collision nightmare much like the forklift could be, but on a bigger scale because of how narrow some of Dobuita streets were.

[Mr357]

A bike could have been a nice feature in Shenmue II, especially when passing through the Golden Quarter.