Jet Set Radio

About this game

It started with a drawing. In the autumn of 1997, as Masayoshi Kikuchi remembers it, he and the artist Ryuta Ueda were in the same department at Sega, finishing Panzer Dragoon Saga (called AZEL in Japan) for the Sega Saturn. Ueda says he was making material for that game's strategy guide, and on the quiet he drew something else. He brought Kikuchi, who would become the game's director, a picture of characters on inline skates. The game that grew from it, Jet Set Radio, came out for Sega's Dreamcast in Japan on June 29, 2000, and in North America that October under the name Jet Grind Radio.

In an interview that 4Gamer published on March 25, 2024, Kikuchi says (translated from Japanese):

"Ueda's drawing was mostly about the characters, but the background looked like Tokyo, so we talked about how the setting must be Japan. The characters were wearing inline skates, so I asked him, 'Have you thought about the genre?' He answered right away, 'Action, obviously,' so the genre was settled just like that (laughs)."

Spraying graffiti was not yet part of the game. At first, Kikuchi says, graffiti appeared only on the walls of the hideout where the characters gathered. Ueda says:

"At the very beginning, the game had no clear goal. We started from 'Just running around isn't a game, so what should we do?' and in the end we thought drawing graffiti would be good."

Kikuchi says:

"Once we decided to do it this way, we built a prototype in a rush of about two months, but it just wouldn't become fun..."

In that first version they built the bus terminal in Shibuya-cho, one of the game's three districts. He says:

"After that, in the next version, which we rebuilt over one month, we got the form that became the starting point of this game. If the player masters grinds and tricks, they can move faster or climb up to high places, and that helps them get through the map."

The Story Behind

Kikuchi says, in the English subtitles of the same 2019 documentary:

"One aspect of the team was that we were all very young, nobody was above 30, we were all in our twenties when we began. At the time, the most important part was to understand to what extent we could use computer graphics. There's an important part in Jet Set Radio that is cel-shading, it was never processed in real-time before."

Cel shading draws 3D models with dark outlines and flat blocks of color, so they look like hand-drawn animation. In 2024 Kikuchi told 4Gamer (translated from Japanese):

"We didn't start because we wanted to do cel shading. The task was how to show the feel of Ueda's drawings, and I was confident that with cel shading, 'we can probably show this picture.'"

Ueda says:

"Back then, games were looking more and more realistic, and I wanted to go in the opposite direction. At the same time, to be honest, we didn't have that many people or that much time, so we were in no position to be making realistic things. It was also an efficient way to make the game."

He says:

"As for the outlines, a designer in our department was making an effect, and a line was showing up around the outside of it. I thought, 'Couldn't we use this?' I asked how it was done, and it worked."

"For the two-tone shading, I talked it over with a programmer who was in the PC lab [Sega's PC software R&D department] at the time, and we were able to do it. Thinking about it again now, Sega's technical skill really was amazing."

Sega was making the Dreamcast itself, so the team could go straight to the people who designed the hardware. Kikuchi says, in the English subtitles:

"One more thing is that we were making the console, meaning we looked at specs and asked the engineers what we could manage, this is how we achieved to create cel-shading, it was quite big."

He told 4Gamer:

"Early in development we didn't have this drawing technique, so we were making it without the characters' outlines or the crisp shadows. It became possible around the middle of development, I think. That changed the whole impression of the game."

Tricks & Tales

Some of the graffiti in the game is by Eric Haze, a graffiti artist from New York. Kikuchi says (4Gamer, March 25, 2024, translated from Japanese):

"Eric's graffiti started because the producer pushed for it. The other pieces were drawn by the designers, Ueda among them, splitting the work."

Players could also draw their own tags (graffiti signatures) with the in-game editor and upload them to an official website, and other players could download them to their Dreamcast. Kikuchi says the upload feature went in at the very end, when Ueda asked for it in the busiest weeks. He says:

"It wasn't a question of 'do we need it or not,' it was 'can we do it or not.' It really was the final stretch, with maybe a month left, if that, until master-up [the finished version sent off for manufacturing] (laughs)."

Ueda says:

"I was the one running that site (laughs). Every so often inappropriate images got posted, so I removed them by hand."

The music is by Hideki Naganuma, a Sega sound creator at the time, alongside songs by outside artists such as Guitar Vader. Kikuchi says:

"Mr. Naganuma went through not only the game's art but the specification documents from end to end, and knew all of it. On the development team, probably nobody but me knew everything. One time he asked me, 'What does this part mean?', and it was a part that had nothing to do with sound. I said, 'Wait, are you reading all of it?' and he said, 'I am' (laughs)."

In the illustrations, Gum, the first character to join your crew, wears her name logo on her chest. In the game it is on her back. Ueda says:

"That's simply my mistake. We were pretty loose about that kind of thing, and there are a few places that differ a bit from the illustrations, but we didn't worry about it much (laughs)."