Who wants to see something really funny/scary ? If anyone remembers last year’s Game Developers Conference, then you might recall the Shenmue postmortem with the legendary game designer and producer, Yu Suzuki. During his speech, Suzuki mentioned the various methods the Shenmue team tried to compress the data in order to not make the game get shipped with a whopping 50 CD-ROMs. “As you can’t actually ship a product on 50 CD ROMs, we targeted launching on three CD ROMs, so we targeted new compression rhythms,” Suzuki explained. One method in which Shenmue tried to compress its data was the sharing of motion. Even if the character’s appearance and skeleton frame was different, the way the models walked could be identical.
This method led to some pretty hilarious results. If you used the female motion on a male character model, Suzuki said it made them “walk like Marilyn Monroe”. The designers tried to cut corners and at one point during the game’s development, they saw cats and dogs walk on their hind legs like human beings. You can’t make this stuff up, people.
The talented folks over at Shenmue500k and Team Yu (#SaveShenmue !) thought it would be funny to recreate this incident, hence the video at the top of this page. They did, however, go one step further and reversed the process, making the human character models walk on all fours. If you stop the video at around 0:40 you will witness one of the NPCs taking a piss near Ajiichi’s Chinese Restaurant. It really is true nightmare fuel. Press play to watch the hilarity ensue! Let us know what you think in the comments below.
