If you were to ask a group of people to put together a list of games that defined the Sega Dreamcast, it’s almost certain that Jet Set Radio would make the cut.
The stylish roller-blading game, developed by the Sega subsidiary Smilebit, was one of the console’s most original titles, presenting the player with an exciting and original premise about graffiti-spraying street gangs battling for turf in a futuristic version of Tokyo, wrapped up in a groundbreaking cel-shaded visual style, and accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack comprised of everything from rock, hip hop, funk, jazz, and dance.
It was the type of game that only a company like Sega would make, and had a culturally-hip, streetwise aesthetic that made it something you wanted to share with your friends, in the hopes that maybe some of its coolness might rub off on you. So, when it was announced back in early 2003 that the New York-based developer Vicarious Visions and the publisher THQ would be teaming up with Sega to release a Game Boy Advance port of the title, it's safe to say there was a mix of excitement and skepticism within the game’s community, with many curious about whether it would live up to the reputation of the original, or simply be another cheap cash-in aimed at exploiting a popular brand.
Rob Gallerani is a former Vicarious Visions employee, and was credited as lead designer and an artist on the Game Boy Advance version of Jet Set Radio. Recently, he agreed to talk to Time Extension about what it was like working on the conversion of the Sega title, giving us some fascinating insight into what Vicarious Visions' plans for the project were, the limited role Smilebit played in its creation, and what he’d end up improving, given the opportunity to revisit it today.
“When it came to how we landed that deal, I can't remember the exact details,” recalls Gallerani. “Instead, I just chalk it up to Karthik and Guha Bala, [Vicarious Visions’ co-founders]. They probably knew a guy who knew a guy. At the time, we were trying to get as many things as we could, and we were always looking for IPs and games that we could capitalize on using the isometric engine we had built for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.
"If you remember, this was the time of EA Big, so there was SSX, but there was also a whole line of Tony Hawk-related games, like Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer and Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX. So they were trying to make a bunch of these kinds of Tony Hawk clone games, and because we had an engine that did that, we were just basically trying to find any IP we could, and Jet Set Radio just happened to be it.
I own a Dreamcast solely for two games, Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi. So to get to work on this project was really awesome.
He continues, "Now I happen to be a die-hard fan of Jet Set Radio. In fact, I own a Dreamcast solely for two games: Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi. So to get to work on this project was really awesome, and it was actually my first design credit."
To give you a bit of context, prior to the announcement that Vicarious Visions would be developing a port of Jet Set Radio, THQ and Sega had already collaborated on number of other titles, having previously signed an ambitious deal in 2001 to co-publish and develop 16 GBA games for the North American market.
According to Peter Moore, the then COO of Sega Corporation, the idea behind this partnership was for Sega (who had only recently retreated from the home console market) to take advantage of “THQ's unparalleled know-how with the GBA platform” to bring some of its most recognisable titles to the Nintendo platform and hopefully expand the company’s “position in the handheld category”.
Jet Set Radio was, therefore, designed to be a continuation of this plan, with Vicarious Vision seeing it as a perfect opportunity to reuse some of the tools and techniques it had built from working on ports of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, 3, and 4. However, it ultimately proved to be far more complicated than the simple reskin many people believed it would be, with the team not only having significantly less development support this time around, but also gradually realising that what worked well for Tony might not translate over quite so smoothly here.
Upon starting work on the project, one of the first goals the team set for themselves was trying to recreate the game's iconic cel-shaded look.
As you may recall from our Tony Hawk “Making Of” from earlier this year, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 took advantage of an engine that was essentially a height map (a 2D representation of a 3D space) that gave the an impression of 3D world. As for the skater, it wasn't a pre-rendered character sprite, as you might expect, with the developers instead creating their own lower-poly 3D models of the skaters in an application like 3D Studio Max, before using a custom real-time 3D renderer, created by the Vicarious Visions employee Alex Rybakov, to render the figure inside of a 64X64 sprite. This could then be overlaid in the levels, giving the player omnidirectional movement, without painstakingly having to put together thousands of frames of animation by hand.
What we would do is we'd render it five times. But the first four times were offset a pixel. So that's how we got the outline around everything.
For Jet Set Radio, the approach remained roughly the same. However, some additional work was required during the rendering process, in order to add in the toon-shading and capture the vibe of the original.
“What we would do is we'd render it five times,” says Gallerani. “But the first four times were offset a pixel. So that's how we got the outline around everything. You’d bump it up one, you’d bump it to the right, you’d bump down one, you’d bump it to the left, and you’d make all of the outlines black. And then you’d do the final render in the middle, and what you would end up with was a toon-shaded character.”
This approach ended up working surprisingly well, with the characters turning out to be fairly accurate approximations of their console counterparts, but the next step figuring out the most efficient way to animate them proved to be a little more frustrating.
Across all of the previous Tony Hawk games, Vicarious Visions was often able to get all of the assets it required from the original developer Neversoft, including the motion capture data. But, on Jet Set Radio, the situation was a little bit different, with the studio's only contact with Smilebit being a few technical emails that had to be translated via Yahoo! Babelfish, due to the language barrier. As a result, the team often found themselves having to improvise to push ahead on the project.
"We tried requesting assets, but, eventually, we just said, ‘You know what, we have a bunch of the discs lying around’," recalls Gallerani. "So we ended up hacking the Dreamcast disc, because we couldn't get any actual assets. Fortunately, the animations in Jet Set were way simpler than Tony. Like Tony is a game all about tricks. And with Jet Set, you're really just like skating, grinding, or spray painting. So it ended up being totally feasible for us to do our own.”
If you haven’t played Jet Set Radio before and are in need of a quick refresher, it is essentially a mission-based game that sees players selecting a location from a map screen (Benten-Cho, Kogane-Cho, Shibuya-Cho, Grind City) before they were thrown into a map where they must paint over a bunch of rival gang’s tags within a set time limit while evading the police. For the handheld port, this formula remained the same, but the team inevitably needed to redo each of the levels to fit in with the game's new isometric perspective. This required them to study the original game, to try and come up with clever solutions for areas where the original 3D layout was causing headaches within the team.
"To give you an idea of the reference we used, we ended up buying the Brady Games guidebook and we also looked at some of the fan websites online," says Gallerani. "The good thing was that the original Jet Set Radio was very arcade-y, which worked really well for our engine. So we didn't have to change too much with the gameplay. Except for how much time you have because the size of the levels were fundamentally different. It was really like how close can we replicate all of this content in a new format and for the most part I feel we got everything, except for a few cases.
"In Jet Set Radio, for example, they had these moments where you had an overpass going over another spot, which meant that you now had like overs and unders. So we had to figure out how to go under it. This is something that the average player didn't notice, but that tech proved to be huge for us. This is because what most people don't even realise is that when you go behind things in Tony or Jet Set Radio, it's just a flat image, even though the world looks 3D. So the problem we faced is how do you make someone look like they go behind something?"
The solution Vicarious Visions came up with for this was to dither out parts of the character whenever they ended up going behind an object, which required building dozens and dozens of "little 2D black & white masks", which they would arrange on a level, and assign different depths to keep the player visible. This was something that had previously been used on the Tony Hawk games but arguably not to the same extent as it ended up being on Jet Set Radio, where maps were usually far more cramped and intricate, with way more obstacles to impede the view of the "camera".
For the most part, this allowed the team to stay faithful to some of the most iconic level layouts of the original game, despite the new perspective, with areas like the Shibuya bus terminal and Park Street and Center Street being fairly accurate recreations of their console counterpart. However, later levels, which were inevitably more complex, ended up going through a lot more changes, with Grind City being the area that was arguably the most impacted the most.
Grind City is an area that wasn't present in the original Japanese Dreamcast release, but was instead added in Western release of the game. It featured two different maps — Bantam Street and Grind Square — though these levels would be combined into one on the Game Boy Advance version, with the team ultimately struggling to create a 1:1 recreation of Grind Square without chopping and changing things drastically.
"I remember one of the levels is kind of like a Times Square knockoff where you're like downtown and there's all these big city buildings," says Gallerani. "And obviously for that we had to take more creative liberties with that one, because you couldn't put a very tall building in the foreground."
Of course, the art and the level design weren't the only issues they faced on the project, with another huge issue being the limitations of the Game Boy Advance's audio capabilities. In the original Dreamcast game, there were over 21 tracks, which just weren't possible to recreate in full. Because of this, Vicarious Visions ended up approaching their friends at Shin'en Multimedia, who also worked on the Tony Hawk games for the GBA, to create sound effects and audio clips that would fit within the available memory.
"The sound player on the Game Boy Advance was not a THX or Dolby Surround system," Gallerani tells me. "So it all had to be really crammed down. I'm fairly certain here we could use the exact audio, because unlike your Crazy Taxis and your Tony Hawk's, the music was mostly written for the game, right? So we just had to kind of make the MIDI or FMOD version of it. So it was just make it sound like this as much as you can, but the good thing is that the music was of a style where making it a bit more retro worked."
"I think the most expensive piece of audio is right in the beginning when the DJ is like, "JET SET RADIOOO". That audio file is probably one of the largest files in the entire game. But we needed it."
In total, Gallerani predicts the game took about 9 months to complete front to back, before it was finally released in North American stores on June 24th, 2003, with the European launch trailing one year after in 2004, following a lengthy delay. As you might expect, there was a lot of interest from both Sega and Nintendo fans. But the reaction upon its initial release proved to be a bit more mixed than most people were probably anticipating.
IGN, which had previously praised Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (GBA) as "a technical marvel", was among the list of publications that proved to be more enthusiastic about the new release, describing the game as "great fun" and stating that the presentation alone was "worth the price of admission".
However, elsewhere, there were also others that were much more critical of the title. The British magazine Edge, for example, awarded the game 4/10, arguing at the time that “the intricate nature of the Jet Set Radio levels is unsuited to isometric presentation” and that though it is not "a lazy port", "the loyalty of the conversion is ill-advised."
Looking at more contemporary coverage of the places like YouTube and Reddit, there still seems to be a very real split within the game's fanbase between those who enjoy the game warts and all, and others who believe its isometric view, steep difficulty jumps, and repetitive audio loops leave something to be desired.
Regarding the response, Gallerani has a few of his own theories as to why Jet Set Radio seems to divide people more than the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, stating that some of the choices carried over from converting Tony Hawk for the GBA, ended up being a bit less intuitive this time around.
Gallerani explains, "One of the weird things with Jet Set is the way their camera worked. And when you don't have the camera work the way that it works in 3D, you notice it more than I think you noticed it in Tony. So in Tony Hawk, all of the controls were camera centric. So if you push down, Tony will skate towards the camera, and the camera will eventually drift back behind him where he's supposed to be. But this meant that you're looking through the world through a screen, and all the things that you're controlling are relative to that screen.
"In Jet Set, the controls are character-relative. But the camera aggressively tries to follow the skater. And so, in that way, it gives the illusion that it's camera-centric, but it's not really. And so, we had to make some changes to get it to work because our camera didn't rotate. It was always fixed. And so I think that little subtle difference is perceivable. The other really big change, from Tony to Jet Set is Jet Set has far more cartoony physics. So in Tony Hawk, if you wanted to make a jump over a thing, the faster you're going, the higher you'll get. It's just kind of like that. That is not how physics work in Jet Set.
"In Jet Set, your jump height is fixed. If you're standing still or if you're going at max speed, your jump height is always identical, no matter what you do. And so it's those kind of subtle differences that I think that if you're going into Jet Set, expecting it to translate exactly the same that Tony translated, that's where you're going to start seeing those types of differences."
Looking back now, he would have loved to taken a slightly more alternative approach to adapting Jet Set Radio to the Game Boy Advance, stating that he would have preferred to tell a new story to expand the universe rather than simply recreate what had already been. He suggests, though, Sega would likely never have permitted this.
"We were just saying, 'This is Jet Set Radio, we're going to retell Jet Grand Radio'," says Gallerani. "But that was it. Same exact characters, same exact story, same exact everything. It would have been nice to be like, 'Hey, let's build some new places. Let's make some new characters. Let's tell some new stories.' And not because I just want to make it my own thing, or have the team come up with their own stuff. But because it would have been less apples to apples and we could make levels that were even better on the Game Boy Advance. So I think that would have been the biggest thing that I would have pushed for."
He continues, "I also would have pushed for a bigger cart and probably would have done more with the create a graffiti and just more multiplayer stuff in general, like a tag mode. Again, it stinks because Game Boy Advance multiplayer required link cables, right? But it would have been cool to do something with the GameCube.
"Back then you could do fun stuff where you could connect a Game Boy Advance to a GameCube. So even if all we did was like a mirror mode where you can just play the game on a bigger screen, I think that would have been pretty cool."
Twenty two years have passed since Jet Set Radio GBA was released, and Gallerani is still in games. Following the release of Jet Set Radio, he continued working at Vicarious Visions, eventually becoming the studio design director, before leaving in 2023. He now works at the independent game developer Super Evil Megacorp as a senior design director.