But Shenmue's director Yu Suzuki had something altogether different in mind. A couple of years after the first episode was released in 1999, modern video game bigness would be defined by Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 3. For better or worse, it also represents an artistic dead-end as a way to imagine the scope that major video game productions could aspire to. Conceived as a multi-part epic, it was over-ambitious, vastly expensive to make and a commercial failure. Sega AM2's unfinished magnum opus is a total one-off - and not only for the right reasons. I did get a taste of it this past week, though, playing Shenmue for the first time. I remember it, but so different is my life now, it's hard to remember what it was really like. We like to romanticise youth as a frenetic blaze of glory, but for the young, dear God, life comes at you slow.
It won't let you go and the clock won't move any quicker to the time you want it to be - the time when something will happen. But hand-in-hand with that suppressed turmoil goes a blissful boredom, a vacant, nothingy existence that might be enforced by a lack of money or purpose, but that has its own remorseless momentum. There's anxiety and depression at that age, a crippling fear that you will never find out who it is you are supposed to be and what it is you are supposed to be doing. Waiting for the one daily bus into town from the Northamptonshire village where I grew up and killing time window-shopping until the one bus back later, as a procrastinating student, ambling down Coney Street in York, pastry in hand, knowing my afternoon would end in me clocking the Super Mario 64 demo for the umpteenth time in GAME, as if I didn't have anything better to do. I'm not talking about the febrile highs or the painful embarrassments - although I remember those too - but the sheer aimlessness, the great stretches of unoccupied time, the loafing.
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