The City Is a Canvas:
Jet Set Radio
at Twenty-Five

The first game to use cel-shading, the first to treat civil disobedience as a mechanic, and the possessor of one of the greatest soundtracks in the history of the medium. A Dreamcast classic that still sounds like the future.

The premise is deceptively simple. You are a rudie — a rollerblading teenager in a near-future Tokyo governed by a corporate police state — and your weapons are inline skates and spray cans. You grind rails, tag walls, outrun the cops, and reclaim your neighbourhood one luminous brushstroke at a time. Jet Set Radio is a game about graffiti as an act of freedom, set to music so precisely right that it feels less like a soundtrack and more like the city itself broadcasting on pirate frequency.

The game holds a Guinness World Record as the first to use cel-shaded graphics — a technique developed by Smilebit's art director Ryuta Ueda in deliberate reaction against the photorealism trend consuming the industry. Thick black outlines, flat colours, exaggerated shapes: the aesthetic was conceived not merely as a visual style but as a statement. A game that looked like a moving comic panel rather than a film set was announcing, from its first frame, that it had different ambitions to everything around it. Smilebit even tried to make the game technically impossible to duplicate on PlayStation 2 — pushing the Dreamcast's colour output and the number of NPCs on-screen past what Sony's hardware could manage.

"We wanted to construct something dealing with pop culture and something that was cool." — Masayoshi Kikuchi, director

The influences were boldly declared. The team cited PaRappa the Rapper, the anti-establishment themes of Fight Club, and 1980s American hip-hop graffiti culture. The in-game graffiti was designed by real artists, including Eric Haze — who had created album art for the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy — lending the game a documentary authenticity that few of its contemporaries attempted. The settings were photographed directly from the Tokyo shopping districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku. Even the pirate radio DJ who narrates the game, Professor K, feels like a genuine transmission from some parallel urban frequency.

And then there is the soundtrack. Composer Hideki Naganuma assembled something that has no clean genre — hip-hop, J-pop, funk, acid jazz, trip-hop, and arrangements that defy categorisation, cut and rearranged until the samples became something new entirely. Naganuma has said that Jet Set Radio and its sequel were his favourite projects of his career. In 2023, Naganuma revealed publicly that he had received multiple approaches from investors and game companies to make a sequel — none of which came to fruition. His conclusion: "Maybe Sega knows." The wound of the series' dormancy runs deep even for those who made it.

The game's cultural reach has only grown in its absence. Wind Waker, Sly Cooper, Viewtiful Joe, and Sunset Overdrive all owe a direct debt to its cel-shading — and the 2023 spiritual successor Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, made by Team Reptile with Naganuma composing, demonstrates how much of what made the original great was never replicated, only approximated. It is available now on PC via Steam. The 2012 HD port removed two tracks for licensing reasons — a small but real wound for purists — but remains the most accessible entry point.