In case you didn’t know, legendary SEGA developer Yu Suzuki gave a Shenmue postmortem today during the Game Developer’s Conference.
During the talk, Suzuki provided fascinating details about the development of Shenmue that we’ve never heard before. Stuff that Ryo Hazuki voice actor Corey Marshall wasn’t able to tell us.
Thankfully, Gamespot and GDC live streamed the entire event and already have an archive up and ready!
awesome.
This wasn’t a postmortem, it was showing off the development cycle.
A postmortem is conventionally performed the cause(s) of death.
This was nothing of that sort.
Yes, “postmortem” is generally defined as “after death.” However, in video game terms, it’s reserved for after a game has been released, thus after it’s development cycle.
When a video game developer hosts a postmortem, they specifically talk about the development cycle when their game was being created or when it was “alive.”
Here I thought he would actually be discussing/evaluating factors that resulted in the games commercial failure.