Still Waiting on the Right Remake

Jet Set Radio came out on the Dreamcast in 2000 and looked like nothing else then or since—cell-shaded Tokyo neighborhoods plastered in graffiti, a soundtrack that sounded like someone had spliced hip-hop, funk, and J-pop together and set it on fire. You played a rollerblading gang tagging the city before the cops could take it back. The whole thing was absurd, hyperkinetic, and had better visual design than most things that call themselves art.

More than a decade later it still hadn’t been properly remade. There was an HD re-release, but that’s not the same thing—that’s just the original running at a higher resolution with cleaner textures. A real remake would rebuild the city from the ground up, keep the music untouched, and let the whole thing breathe at a framerate the original hardware could never sustain. Keep the attitude, lose the jank.

The games that deserve remakes are always the ones that were ahead of their hardware. Jet Set Radio had an aesthetic the Dreamcast couldn’t fully deliver—you could feel the gap between what it was reaching for and what the machine could actually render. That’s the version I want. The one it was always trying to be.