Best of the Decade: Shenmue
Mon, January 10, 2011 at 7:14 PM 
Shenmue
Platform: Dreamcast
Release Date: November 6, 2000
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Sega AM2
Technically speaking, Shenmue shouldn’t have quite made this list. I value honesty, so I’ll put that out there before anyone calls me on it. Some people celebrated their best of the decade at the end of 2009. Fair enough. I like round numbers, so I did mine at the end of 2010, where the year ends with a nice zero.
The downside to this is that the year 2000 was 11 years ago. Eleven years is more than a decade. Well, screw it I say, because I’m not going to let a puny couple of months keep me from celebrating this under-appreciated and influential title.
See, some people would have put Grand Theft Auto III in this spot. Truly it would be deserving, as I can’t think of a single game more influential over the last ten years than Rockstar’s first open-world opus. Hell, half the games on this list wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Grand Theft Auto III.
But this list isn’t the most important or influential games of the past ten years, it’s those that I consider my favorites. My criteria may be subjective, but I happen to think that makes the list more personal and more interesting.
So I’m choosing Shenmue. This forgotten Dreamcast classic did “open-world” before it was cool and paired it with a story that was gripping and epic to boot. It’s a story that was never finished because of poor sales and skyrocketing budgets, and that’s a damn shame, but I don’t think that should overshadow what Shenmue accomplished.
Shenmue was a game before its time. Only later would technology and economics make games of this scale and depth successful on a broader scale, but Sega tried it anyway and forged a path for all to come.