Shenmue was an ambitious game for its time, incorporating a massive open world, environments full of people and activity and a complex combat system, all of which was delivered using state of the art graphics. It was a huge project and, as director Yu Suzuki revealed during the Shenmue postmortem panel atGDC 2014, it wasn't without some bizarre development bugs. In fact, up to 300 were found every day, according to Suzuki.

Without some form of compression, said Suzuki (through interpreter Mark Cerny), all of the content in Shenmue would have required 50-60 CD-ROMs. As that would have been ... prohibitive to the average consumer, the Shenmueteam had to come up with ways to save space, though this sometimes created unexpected results. Like cats walking on two legs.

http://www.joystiq.com/2014/03/21/sh...-people-and-e/