My time at university is bookended by moments that changed my idea of what games could be. When I started my first year, I saw Tomb Raider running on an upside-down PS1 in someone’s dorm and I was stunned and sort of disconcerted. My 2D gaming mind had no idea how to understand a game that seemed so comfortable in three dimensions, but which also – after years of seeing increasingly refined pixel art – seemed so comfortable with being so ragged. The gaps in Lara’s polygonal joints. The clipping of 3D surfaces. The way the polygons around the sides of the screen sometimes disappeared giving the image the perforated edge of a postage stamp. Was this a step forward or a step back?
Then, just after my final year: a friend’s house, a Dreamcast and Jet Set Radio. The colour, the flat shapes – the Cel-shading! The sense of a graffiti aesthetic carried all the way through a game to its rigging and its bones. I will never forget that glimpse of a game, and my sheer disbelief that it was a thing that moved, a 3D world, and not a gorgeous static image.
Bookends. And we start with one concerned with the power of new perspectives and a way of physically being in a game’s space, only to end with one concerned with the power of representation, style and surfaces.
Somehow, then, this was 25 years ago. This means Jet Set Radio is 25 years old – right now, I gather. And in a way this makes sense: few games are so engaged with their visual look and their sense of the ways in which style roots you in a time and a place. So yes, Jet Set Radio fairly screams 2000 to me. But also, few games feel – well – kind of timeless. In their art? Yes. In their mechanics? Less so. But in their sense of what games were becoming, and what games could be? Absolutely.