The recent release of Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed on both iOS and Android brings the excellent crossover kart racer to even more Sega fans, but it also brought something to our attention: Sega and Sumo Digital placed a very clever tease in the game, and you can see it in that screenshot above of Ryo Hazuki of Shenmue fame.

If you look closely, you can see that on Ryo’s land vehicle, the OutRun arcade cabinet, the license plate clearly says “SHEN3”. Now this could easily just be a nod to fans who have been begging for a conclusion to the currently unfinished story, or it could be a real hint that the developer is finally going to finish the Shenmue saga. It could also be a cruel tease that amounts to nothing.

This is definitely not as promising as that supposed trademark filing was back in November, although that turned out to be a cruel prank from a fan wanting to get a rise out of Shenmue fans. The timing for that prank was perfect as it happened just after confirmation of Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki hosting a postmortem for the series, at the Game Developer’s Conference this year.

So we still don’t have any concrete evidence that Sega is letting Suzuki-san finish his story, but at least they’re doing something for the fans.