Perhaps its biggest feat was getting Jet Set Radio composer Hideki Naganuma himself involved. Hover’s city specifically has more verticality, to fit with its parkour movement where you can climb on every single building, and it's also filled with lots of missions and codexes as a way of deepening the story (albeit a rather daft one that has a revolt of gamers as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism). I realised that a city could be a wonderful playground in a video game!” While it swaps inline skates for urban free-running akin to Mirror's Edge, Hover's cel shaded cyber city and rail-grinding has Jet Set Radio written (or sprayed) all over it.Īrtistic director Charles Vesic was particularly taken by Jet Set Radio’s architecture: “The neighbourhoods fit together in a coherent manner and complemented each other in terms of level design and ambience. One of these is the crowd-funded Hover from France-based Midgar Studios. Nonetheless, the re-release managed to bring the cult classic to a wider audience, which may explain why there are more examples of developers inspired by Jet Set Radio in the years that followed. It’s a shame, then, that Sega never sought to revive the series, instead making do with an HD port of the original. Jet Set Radio Future cemented my love for non-photorealistic rendering so much that I actually turned down job offers during my career to work on extremely large and popular franchises at huge, successful studios because the realistic art styles were just too boring for me.” “My art went from emulating the house style of Image Comics towards a more stylised, anime style. “Jet Set Radio was unlike anything I had seen before,” he tells me over email. I even did a fist-pump when I saw anime hack-and-slasher Scarlet Nexus amongst the line-up in Xbox’s next-gen reveal.īack in 2000, as an art school dropout looking to get his foot in the door in the games industry, Jet Set Radio had an immediate impact back for Jesse Sosa, creative director of Dinosaur Games. The style has its detractors, but it warms my cockles whenever I see developers embracing it, from the gorgeous Moebius-inspired Sable, to Revolution Games’ return to Union City with Beyond A Steel Sky, with art direction from renowned comic artist Dave Gibbons. Opting for a more distinctive, stylised approach, 3D characters in Jet Set Radio were transformed into living cartoons that still look as pumping fresh now as the day they were conceived. The most obvious of its influences is its pioneering use of cel shading, which rebelled against the industry’s pursuit of more pixels and photorealism. With small but still thriving communities of fans, the time seems ripe to talk about games being developed now that are looking to Jet Set Radio's inline skates for inspiration, as well as dreams of a potential sequel. It may have failed to help turn Sega’s fortunes around (but hey, their loss in the console business was our gain) but it remains a beloved favourite that still has an influence on games today. An anti-establishment skating action game with a killer soundtrack, Jet Set Radio was the hippest thing ever to burst onto the scene of the Dreamcast’s short lifespan.
GUM JET SET RADIO GRAFFITI PC
Okay, so technically it wasn't until 2012 that PC players got to skate, tag and grind for themselves, but June 29th marked the 20th anniversary of the original release of Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio, as it was known Stateside at the time).
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