Shaping the future
Meet the studio making Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a Jet Set Radio revival with street culture sincerity
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a Jet Set Radio revival with street sincerity
On a Wednesday afternoon in late July, 15 seconds of footage took Twitter by storm. With over 100,000 likes and 45,000 retweets, the short but sweet musical sting for Team Reptile’s
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk whipped up the collective nostalgia of Jet Set Radio fans into a powerful frenzy.
Managing director Tim Remmers
hadn’t underestimated the appetite of the community behind Sega’s long-forgotten series. Still, the small Dutch studio’s expectations were blown out of the water as the teaser quickly became one of the top Twitter game announcements of all time, nearly equalling EA’s Skate 4
reveal. “That’s not what we expected,” notes Remmers, who has been fighting his email backlog ever since.
The response to the trailer has been a source of validation for Team Reptile, which has been working on the game for a while without any outside feedback. “It’s been almost 20 years since the last Jet Set Radio game, and we’re all grasping for anything that looks like it or feels like it,” says game director Dion Koster. “It could have happened ten years earlier, but we had to be ready for it.”
The commercial and competitive success of projectile-fighting precursor
Lethal League Blaze demanded a lot of the studio’s attention, but it also gave Team Reptile the confidence and the resources to embark on this ambitious project, one the studio’s been working up to for a long time. “We kept believing that it was bigger than games,” adds Koster. “Like, you’re grabbing people that don’t even play games, you’re grabbing people that just enjoy the street culture.”
For Koster, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is more than just a spiritual successor to a beloved Sega franchise: it feels like his destiny. Koster grew up in the Netherlands heavily embedded in the underground dance scene. “I was involved with graffiti and dancing and skating even before I played Jet Set Radio.”
Ryuta Ueda’s Tokyo-To aesthetic made its mark on him by reflecting a futuristic vision of his formative culture, with extreme fashion, stylised graffiti and rocket-boosted skating tricks. He mentions he’s been secluding himself from internet art styles throughout development – exposure to underground art in the real world, such as stickers and prints, is of greater interest. Sporting analogue and digital influence from the likes of Takashi Murakami, Ippei Gyoubu and Gorillaz artist Jamie Hewlett, Koster is set to carry the Jet Set torch.
Like many of you, we suspect, we wonder why Sega never returned to the cult hit Jet Set series itself: given the current state of the world, its anti-establishment trappings feel entirely of the moment. “I’ve been quite on top of this in the last 20 years. 10 years ago, I was already sure they would never make another one,” Koster says, citing the departures of composer Hideki Naganuma, alongside artist Ryuta Ueda who, Koster notes, “doesn’t seem to have much affinity for those projects.”
Remmers adds, “If it will happen, it would happen like how they did Yooka Laylee – former employees coming together to build a spiritual successor.” With half of the team now working on the Yakuza series, however, it’d be hard to imagine it actually happening. Plus, as Koster points out, “Jet Set Radio was never a game that was put on a high pedestal just for game design. So for me, it’s really just the world and the vibe it creates, and it’s a shame that it’s not been developed further.”
Hence Team Reptile’s determination to do just that. In building the traversal mechanics, the studio is focusing on tricking – a martial arts discipline mixing gymnastics with breakdancing moves, resulting in raw but fluid flips and twists. Koster wants navigation to feel like you’re “subverting the architecture of the city“to reach graffiti spots.“We don’t do the Sonic thing where you have things specifically built for you to go somewhere, like springboards.” In the current build, players don magnetic sneakers instead of inline skates to slide, wall-run and grind on rails, using a boostpack to air dash and project their avatar horizontally, chaining tricks into smooth lines.
Inspired by the movement tech in 2019’s Daemon X Machina, the boostpack system lets players hover and spray graffiti with the “anime sword fight slashes“seen in the game’s trailer. “We wanted to grab graffiti and not be roughand-tough realistic, but actually bring it up into a street fantasy,” notes Koster.
Team Reptile is aiming to launch Bomb Rush Cyberfunk by the end of 2021, and both Remmers and Koster acknowledge that the game is still in an iterative stage. Koster rejects the “high and mighty” notion that designers should have a complete plan for a finished game in mind ahead of development. “I just love evolving the game design as we did with the other games like [ Lethal League] Blaze, I think you should just be humble and say ‘no’... you improvise and you get to more interesting things.”
“You’re grabbing people that don’t even play games, […] people that just enjoy the street culture”