Shenmue was originally intended to get a full remake at one point, but ended up cancelled
Though Shenmue 1 & 2 was given a re-release earlier this year, in the form of a simple remaster, it seems that at one point, things were going to be much different. SEGA had originally planned to entirely remake the first two Shenmue games for the current generation of systems, but due unknown problems, the remake was cancelled in 2017, and the team was moved to doing the remaster that we would eventually see on August 21, 2018. Digital Foundry found footage of this original unreleased version of the game, and have done a video analysis comparing it to the remaster. Higher quality and sharper textures and other improvements in terms of shadow quality and lighting were added to the games. Things that were once flat textures have been changed to become fully 3D objects, and character models were also improved. The footage shown is implied to be a working build that wasn't finished, because of the unfinished nature of some of the changes, but this proves that at one point, SEGA wanted to remake one of their cult classic games, though due to time constraints and other development problems we instead got a remaster.
