A video game studio launched a crowdfunding campaign so popular it literally broke Kickstarter

The newly launched crowdfunding campaign for forthcoming game Shenmue III has already been wildly successful, Motherboard reports - so successful it actually managed to break crowdfunding website Kickstarter.

The game is a sequel to the previous Shenmue titles, which were open-world adventure games. Shenmue I was released on the Dreamcast on 1999, and Shenmue II followed up two years later in 2001. And that was it. Though the games are considered cult classics, no follow-up was ever released.

Until now. At a Sony press conference on Tuesday, Shenmue III was finally announced, 14 years after its predecessor. Developer Yu Suzuki announced that it would be launched through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter - and the response has been wild.

Kotaku is reporting that the game has already broken not one but two crowdfunding records, after being live for less than single day. It has become both the fastest game to reach one million dollars, and the fastest game to reach two million dollars - and it's still going strong.

At one point, it was so popular that it actually broke the site, and forced Kickstarter to post a warning that it is "experiencing slow performance," and "if you have made a pledge to Shenmue 3, you may not see your pledge reflected on the project page straight away."

Kickstarter later tweeted that it had "never seen anything like this":

The Kickstarter campaign has currently raised around $2,450,000 - though that number is rising fast. In the time it took to write this article, it raised more than $25,000.

Want to understand what all the hype is about? Watch the trailer: