Hey everyone, The Gang got back together for a new trailer based on the night Shenmue III was announced.
As a Shenmue fan, there were two things I wanted to show in this video. One was to recreate my experience of the night Shenmue III was announced - an event that was overshadowed by the fact that the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup that same night. For us fans, the Shenmue III announcement was a monumental thing, and we treated it as such! But outside of our online fan community, in the real world, I had very few people I could share that excitement with. It's easy to forget that the world at large doesn't even know what Shenmue is, and probably never will. So I wanted to poke fun at the feeling that I'm sure we've all experienced when you interact with people who don't give a shit about something that, to you, is a huge deal.
The other idea I wanted to poke fun at was the enormous pressure Shenmue III is under to basically be the greatest thing ever. 14 years is a long time, and I myself had sort of accepted the idea that Shenmue III would never come out years ago. Now that it's coming, after the initial excitement wore off, I really had mixed feelings. Would this be the game I wanted 14 years ago? After all these years of imagining what would happen in Shenmue III (not to mention making a freaking movie in 2006 about what I thought would happen), am I going to be able to accept it if the story doesn't play out the way I've always imagined?
Personally, I've tried to adopt a philosophy that is summed up in a quote from the original Star Trek, which is in this new trailer we've made: "You may find that HAVING is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as WANTING." I don't know what to expect when Shenmue III comes out, and I'm going to try and keep an open mind until it does. When you dream about having something for so long, it's very easy to feel let down once you finally get it, and I don't want that to happen! I want to enjoy Shenmue III for what it is when it finally gets here. If I let my expectations get the better of me, I could easily react like the fans in this trailer do.
So, if nothing else, I hope this video reminds us all that Shenmue III is, at the end of the day, just a video game. Yes, it's one we've waited a long time for, but if we don't keep everything in perspective, it's a slippery slope into that post-apocalyptic future. Thanks for watching (and supporting our movies for the last 15 years)!