In what looks like a massive coup for fan culture and community interest, Yu Suzuki’s newest game of the Shenmue series is becoming a reality. The Kickstarter for Shenmue III was announced at E3 2015 during the Sony PlayStation press conference with a seemingly modest goal of $2 million, which the game has handily exceeded at closing with $6,333,295 in funding and almost 69,320 backers.

Shenmue is described as an open world action-adventure video game produced by Suzuki that featured brawler battles and quick time events. Due to its open world nature, Shenmue featured non-player characters who had their own daily schedule, and the world even had its own day/night cycle as well as weather patterns. The first installment, Shenmue I, launched in 1999 and Shenmue II released in 2002. However, that was the last that fans heard of the series as Sega cancelled then Shenmue III.

Now E3 this year changed all that.

The sheer popularity of Shenmue cannot be understated. After the announcement at E3, it took only nine hours to fund the project at the $2 million mark. IGN also reports that it took only one hour and 42 minutes to make its first $1 million; this latter figure unseats the previous record of six hours and five minutes set by Torment: Tides of Numenera in 2013.

The Kickstarter Inc. funding makes Shemue the highest funded video game in Kickstarter history, which topples the previous record holder of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and its $5,545,991 total.

Kickstarter: A place where fans push what they want

Kickstarter launched in 2009 and since then video game developers have gone to the platform in order to take into fan communities. It has been especially successful for developers and producers with high visibility and projects which fans believed to have been dropped into the dustbin. Shenmue III is only one example.

However, the relative recency of Kickstarter and the length of time it takes to develop games means few of these projects have come to bear games.

Amid the best known video game Kickstarter projects, Star Citizen continues to gain funding after a highly successful $500 thousand funding round at over $2 million—which has seen multiple million-dollar milestones ($40 million, $66 million) and has expanded beyond $85 million by press time. Although Star Citizen does have playable components, it is still in mid-development cycle.

The big name attached to Star Citizen is none other than Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame.

Another example is Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar, a successfully crowdfunded, upcoming massively-multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that ended its Kickstarter campaign in 2013 to the tune of almost $2 million and 22,000 backers. The producer of this game none other than MMORPG luminary Richard “Lord British” Garriot, developer of the Ultima Online series.

With Shenmue, the already-beloved franchise, Suzuki’s popularity, and the platform of the Sony PlayStation E3 press conference probably all played parts in catapulting the Kickstarter into the stratosphere.

The hard part is over for the fans: now they just need to wait for the game to develop and arrive.

Kickstarter is not the end of funding

As seen with the Star Citizen campaign, Kickstarter is not the end of community support for video game projects. While it’s good to get the ball rolling, a steady influx of new fans and participants often continues into the long tail during development. Shenmue III’s developer is taking this to heart.

In a forum post, Team Yu posted that the game will continue to take crowdfunding pledges via PayPal.

“Yu Suzuki announced live on Twitch that PayPal donations will be accepted to continue raising that budget through further crowdfunding,” wrote Team Yu. “Once details become available on how to donate via PayPal, we will share them here–but we will link to the official source. Please do not send money to any PayPal account that you haven’t verified…”

Fans who missed out on the groundswell are still in luck.

Image credit: Shenmue III Kickstarter, “Thank you.”