Shenmue

Shenmue is a 1999 action-adventure developed by Sega AM2 for the Dreamcast, telling the story of Ryo Hazuki, a young man in 1980s Yokosuka, Japan, searching for the man who murdered his father.

Famous for its extraordinary detail, the game let players explore a fully realized town, talk to residents who followed their own daily schedules and weather-driven routines, examine ordinary objects, and even play fully functional arcade cabinets and collect capsule toys. It blended martial-arts brawling based on the developer's fighting-game engine with early quick-time event sequences, a term the game helped popularize, and a slow, deliberate pace that emphasized atmosphere and mundane routine.

Enormously expensive to produce and often cited as one of the costliest games of its time, Shenmue pioneered ideas about open, living worlds and a director-coined open-scenario design that later became standard. It has since been re-released for modern platforms, and a long-awaited third entry eventually arrived, allowing newcomers to experience this influential and unusual milestone in game design.