The owner of Shenmue Dojo emailed Adam Doree editor at Kikizo and asked him to get any information on Shenmue III or Shenmue online well this is the reply we got....

Hey,

To clarify, what I meant was I wanted to get clarification on something I heard a couple of days ago, which is that yes, Shenmue Online is fucked and Suzuki's status is, once again, up in the air, which counts Shenmue III totally out of the picture right now. This is confirmed, it seems. I am not running any story on it.

(Next Gen Article)
Yeah Neil did do stuff for us in the earlier days of Kikizo, and though I don't specifically remember saying it to him, yeah I have said those words to plenty of people; I regret publishing that story to an extent because as stone-solid true and genuine as our source was - someone who was and still is on the production side at AM2 - quite well known but not publicly enough (in the west) for anyone on your forum to have ever guessed correctly - things changed rapidly during and afterwards of publishing the story, and most short-sighted people following the story blame us for inaccurate reporting. Our reporting was fair and the facts were true; Sega's consistency, communication to RHQs, and perhaps decisions, were not. SoA's flat out denial was hilarious to me. It's a big company and the fact that then-PR people in America had no idea of the status of something we had been following more intimately than they had, for ages, I have to say, came as no surprise.

Reporting on something that is such a distant (2-3 year) possibility from provable fruition, in the light that it MIGHT get an announcement more imminently than that, when we cannot name a source and offer no evidence, and offer just our word for it, was a bad idea. It harmed my/our reputation, Kikizo's name and the rest of it. We're only publishing exclusive news ever since then when a) it can be revealed as obviously true soon afterwards (many times this has happened for us - including Sega scoops); or b, we can quote and name our source, and then if it's bullshit it's their fault for lying, not ours (Case in point, Ogawa denying Nights about a week before it was announced - Rest. Case.). It was a valuable lesson. I know plenty of things that falls into neither a) nor b) to be true right now about all kinds of game stories that would be big, and would simply not publish them for this reason. Companies change minds, companies lie, companies will say media is lying to make them look better, and so on.

As for Shenmue, I would have to say at this stage, it is worth forgetting about. If all the fans get any rich relatives together and channel it though Dojo perhaps we could buy rights, hire Suzuki (he'd likely say yes) and independently make the game under license from Sega at no risk to them. That is the only way it will get made at this stage I think. "

Sorry about this.
Adam





Lovely news... Hopes for a shenmue III keep looking further and further away.