Shenmue/Trivia

Acclaimed Flop: Hugely popular and considered a masterpiece by several gaming outlets upon its release, but the sales were too weak to cover development costs (not entirely surprising as Shenmue was the most expensive game of all time at the time of its release, with a budget of $47 million, equivalent to $67 million in 2015).
Creator Killer: A mild example, as while he still worked for Sega, Yu Suzuki's career took a serious hit, and he was unable to make another game as good as Shenmue, and it's heavily implied he was Kicked Upstairs.
Doing It for the Art: The first game is rumored to be one of the most expensive games ever produced (roughly $70,000,000 in 1999 currency, although that was later revealed to be an embellishment and the real budget was $47,000,000). But there's no way anyone could say it was wasted. Pushing the limits of the Dreamcast's technology to create unbelievable levels (at the time) of facial mapping and reactive AI that adhered to personal schedules for every NPC you see. Loads of tiny details like being able to open desk drawers each with their own unique texture maps and a very accurate (at the time) recreation of Yokosuka, Japan. They even went so far as to gather accurate weather pattern data for the region in the late-1986/early-1987 period over which the game takes place and integrate it (the game has its own weather pattern that it generates but upon beating the game once, you can use the period-accurate meteorological data for Yokosuka on a repeat playthrough).
Killer App: Of the Sega Dreamcast. In fact, it was the 4th best selling game in the white console, just after Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi. Back in the day, playing Shenmue was one of the reasons alone to go and buy a Sega Dreamcast.
Magnum Opus Dissonance: This was slated to be Yu Suzuki's—and in general SEGA-AM2's—best, but unfortunately, it ended up being an Acclaimed Flop at best. This seems to be changing with the Shenmue III Kickstarter though, which met its goal in less than half a day.
No Export for You: The second one was never released on Dreamcast in North America. The Xbox release was a year later. Many die hard fans imported even though it was expensive and required a special disc that could cancel regional lockout. It was still cheaper than buying an Xbox which had just been released.
Schedule Slip: Shenmue III was originally slated to be released in late 2017, but was pushed back to late 2018. Suzuki claims the reason for the delay was because the modern development tools allowed the developers to do more than what they thought was possible, causing the project to grow bigger than originally intended.
Vaporware: The MMORPG Shenmue Online that was hyped after the release of Shenmue II, where players would be allowed to join three clans, led by Shenhua, Ren and Xiuying. The game suffered from Development Hell as it switched developers over the years, and was never released. Yu Suzuki attempted to relaunch the series years later with the social RPG Shenmue City, announced in 2010 for cell phones and PCs, but only a cell phone version was released which was discontinued the following year.