While Yu Suzuki and his team continues to work on Shenmue III, Sega may be contemplating releasing a HD remastered version of the Shenmue series.
According to recent comments by Sega Europe, the company is “currently investigating” the potential to remaster both Shenmue and Shenmue II, games which were released back in 1999 and 2001 respectively.
“Of course we would love to release these tomorrow. Sadly, it’s not as simple as porting the games to current platforms, as we would need to ensure that any HD remaster lived up to the quality of the original titles. And with games as immersive as Shenmue 1 and 2, there are further complications from licensed products that were included in the original games. That said, we’d love to do it and are currently investigating how to make it a reality,” says Dan Sheridan, Community Manager for Sega.
Licensed products could probably be the biggest problem when it comes to remastering Shenmue as the original games have quite a number of product placement for rather big companies such as Coca-cola, Timex, and even Toshiba. That said though, Sega expressing interest in remastering the original two games in the Shenmue series means that the potential for it to happen is rather high.
Source: Polygon