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. 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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