Jet Set Radio: grinding the cutting edge of cool for 25 years

It’s the year 2025, and the Y2K aesthetic is inescapable. Charlie XCX has brought Von Dutch back into the public consciousness, Nike’s chunky-soled trainers are a must-have. Even the humble flip phone has returned from the grave. It’s fitting then that 2025 is the year that Jet Set Radio celebrates its 25th anniversary – there is perhaps no game more representative of the attitude and style of the new millennium era than Sega’s bold and brilliant Dreamcast skate ‘em up.

The mid-90s saw video-game companies trying to shake off a childish and nerdy reputation as they tried their best to make gaming cool. Sega’s marketing team found success and street cred tapping into an edgy hacker and cyberpunk aesthetic for their memorable Mega Drive adverts before Sony entered the market and completely stole their thunder. 

They aggressively marketed to older players – pitching the PlayStation as the cool kid’s console of choice, with commercials that tapped into a grungy music video aesthetic. Wipeout, Psygnosis’s flagship future racing on the brand-new platform, featured a groundbreaking contemporary soundtrack from Orbital, Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers, as Sony made the game available to clubbers taking a break from the dancefloor in clubs around the world. In 2000 Sega sought to regain some of this conceded territory with Jet Set Radio, a game that is remembered for its bombastic style as much as its addictive core gameplay.

It was created by Sega’s Smilebit studio (a studio that had an average developer age under 25 at the time), with director Masayoshi Kikuchi stating that the team explicitly wanted to construct, “something dealing with pop culture and something that was cool”. 

In Jet Set Radio rival graffiti skate gangs battle it out in a stylised Tokyo while avoiding the police force and their Dirty Harry-esque leader, Captain Onishima. Goals consist of tagging missions against the clock, boss battles, and graffiti trials within environments expertly designed around an uninterrupted flow of skating action. Rail grinding and wall riding are smooth and intuitive, while tricks add variety and enable wild stunts. 

Some Jet Set Radio DNA has even seeped into Mario Kart, with the latest title, Mario Kart World, allowing Nintendo’s plumber and friends to pull off moves that seem to be lifted directly from the moveset of Jet Set’s heroic street gang, the GG’s. The kinetic gameplay is supported by a distinct cel-shaded style – a graphic technique that gives 3D models a 2D look through thick exterior lines and distinct flat colour blocking. Cel-shading is still widely used in the industry today, but the game was the first (and arguably still the best) game to use this technique. It was even awarded a Guinness World Record for the achievement. At any given moment Jet Set Radio resembles a vivid piece of graffiti art in motion.

Style is Jet Set Radio’s selling point. In terms of gameplay and motion, Sega gifts the player the tools to grind, flip and tag their way stylishly through Tokyo, leaving a cloud of spray paint in their wake. But the game also drips style in every aspect of its presentation. The in-game graffiti was designed by real graffiti artists, including the legendary Eric Haze, stamping the game with authenticity. 

Japanese street fashion takes centre stage, the game proudly showcasing the vibrant youth culture the Japanese capital had become famous for. This builds on earlier work Sega had achieved on their 1996 arcade fighter Last Bronx, which featured costume designs based on real Tokyo youth subcultures. The clothes of Beat, Gum and the rest of the gang in Jet Set Radio are more colourful and expressive – they look like they come straight from the pages of Fruits, the cult Japanese street fashion magazine that gained an army of worldwide obsessives and shone an international light on Japanese street style.

Complementing the hip visual style and smooth gameplay is a dynamic soundtrack that captures the tone of Tokyo youth perfectly. Composer Hideki Naganuma mixes influences from hip-hop, J-pop, trip-hop and electro to create music that functions as the aural equivalent of the hyperactive visuals. Samples are vital to this musical collage; Jet Set Radio samples everything from Paula Abdul to C+C Music Factory to the Tony Hancock radio play, The Radio Ham. The Western release of the game also added licensed tracks from Jurassic 5 and Rob Zombie. Echoing Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), key narrative highlights in the game are relayed by a radio DJ, in this case the pirate radio master DJ Professor K, host of the eponymous Jet Set Radio. 

Unfortunately, and despite a stellar line-up of titles, the Sega Dreamcast was Sega’s last video game console. Relatively poor sales meant they had to switch up their model and move to publishing games on non-Sega systems. Smilebit switched to developing games for the original Xbox, releasing a 2002 sequel, Jet Set Radio Future, to critical acclaim on the fledgling system. 

In 25 years, the original game has influenced everything from the street style of Splatoon to the stylised graphic representation of Tokyo in The World Ends with You. The most direct inspiration manifests in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a non-Sega spiritual sequel which also boasts a soundtrack composed by Hideki Naganuma. 

Sega since unexpectedly unveiled a new Jet Set Radio in 2024 – included in a slate of titles resurrecting their legendary dormant franchises alongside reboots of Crazy Taxi, Golden Axe and Shinobi. Development on the new title remains shrouded in secrecy with no indication on whether the original team is involved at all. Naganuma tweeted in 2022, “I don’t think Sega would hire me again. Because they didn’t appreciate my music that much. The proof is that when I said I was leaving Sega, no one stopped me”, and so it seems unlikely he will return to create another iconic soundtrack, which leaves some big (roller) boots to fill. 

Regardless, the appetite for Jet Set Radio remains high. The 25th anniversary has seen the release of official rollerblades, collaborations with super-hip LA-based artist and designer collective Brain Dead and a DJ set for NTS radio. It’s 2025 and Jet Set Radio remains as cool as it was in the year 2000.