Official artwork for Jet Set Radio for the SEGA Dreamcast

There’s a specific sub-genre of the existing broadness of cyberpunk that I see rarely communicated as an independent aesthetic of its own (while still paying homage to its cyberpunk roots). Born of the Y2K Era — that gave us such great cultural forms as overly glossy designs, Now That’s What I Call Music, and the Sega Dreamcast — this aesthetic seems to infuse the height of the skater culture of urban California during the ’70s and the alien ambiance that came with what our minds could conceptualize during the said era: What new technology and cultural forms could possibly await us on the dawn of this new millennium?

(A fair warning: this article does require that you know at least the basics of what defines cyberpunk to be able to fully appreciate it).

To give a few examples of what defined the appearance of the Y2K aesthetic, Leigh Alexander writes that “synthetic or metallic-looking materials, inflatable furniture, moon-boot footwear, and alien-inspired hairstyles were just a few signposts of the spirit of the age. Even popular music videos of the time had a cluster of common traits: shiny clothes, frosty hues, set-pieces that resembled airlocks or computer interfaces, and a briefly omnipresent ‘bubble pop’ sound effect — almost as if the music charts could foretell the end of the dotcom age.” [1] So with those ideas in mind, it’s basically what I referenced above: an NSYNC music video, but if you’re someone with grossly liberal taste like me, you’d find value in the production of said music videos. And if you’re someone with as much as an aesthetic bloodlust like me, you’d viciously search for the deeper meanings behind it.

“The angsty 1990s were behind us, the dotcom bubble was swelling and yet to come was the market bust and “war on terror”. Y2K — the supposed turn-of-the-century bug that would bring our infrastructure to a terrifying halt — had failed to materialize and for a brief moment there was nothing but glittering utopian futurism and faith in a new age of boundless possibility.” Leigh Alexander [1]

For many, this new aesthetic approach felt like a far-off glance into the future: our digital worlds were constructed within either the newfound optimism or pessimism regarding how it’d turn out decades from now (now being the year 2000), and it all depended on how we used the emerging Internet. Was it going to be the necessary tool for liberating ourselves from the chains of modernist capitalism, or was it going to be a new form for it to take on, giving it even more range of control over us? To come to that postmodern lens of it, I had to get through the Band-Aid of taking off my nostalgia goggles for a moment to see what cultural conditions led to this aesthetic coming into existence and having the characteristics it did, but it was all worth it to dirty my nails and get a name down for this beautiful set of artistic motifs formed from its subconscious mysticism.

As stated earlier, the Y2K Era was broadly defined by the newfound optimism with what opportunities the future could afford us, and the mainstreaming of the Internet was the largest benefactor to this cultural and creative optimism. The other contributing factors for it were the ongoing “War on Terror” and anxiety over the dotcom bubble. With this foundation, I’ve managed to arrive at a more cynical view in which this era — while largely being defined by the nearly unexplainable emotional giddiness of it — fetishized the idea of technological progress rather than actually engage with it. The gist was that all of this progress we’d soon be making should be left in the hands of the smart, professional science people, and that we’d simply be the subjects of whatever new products come about from the dispelling of fear for future entrepreneurs.

It was this attitude that left us with the major developers of our conceptualized dreams to be the designers of the era: Ones equally drawn in by the abundant shininess of the common consensus. From here, it can be seen as obvious why the whole era could accurately be described as “glossy”, as gloss was something that gave the illusion of luster and newness, and that was an important tool in making up for the sheer lack of immediate application of new technologies at the time. You see, the glossiness served as a compensation for the waiting period we’d have to sit through until we arrived at what I call the Macro Era in 2008 (which will be given its own manifesto in the future). Ultimately, we were being given largely unimpressive leaps in technology from the decade prior, and we chose to masquerade this through the glossiness. That, or you could view it as aggrandization of technology that was largely impressive for the time: The glossiness served to sell just how brand-spanking-new our culture was. It was the beginning of the new millennium after all!

So, we’ve arrived at the conclusion about the Y2K Era stated earlier if viewed from a dialectic or lightly anti-capitalist perspective: That it seemed as a creative choice between exploring how this newfound optimism for our technological progress would either be a necessary tool to liberate ourselves from modernism’s trappings or a lost cause that’d just repeat the optimism of the ’90s in a glossier tone. Some creators took on the latter approach (and they were largely right to do so), and that single choice to portray the foolishness of our optimism — simply because an infrastructure bug we thought would happen didn’t — created, what I’d consider to be, some of the greatest works of the era. Particularly, I was enthralled at what the age-old genre of cyberpunk evolved into when transferred into this dynamic of preparing for a societal condition where the optimism from Y2K wore off quickly and capitalist realism settled in, this time with fun, new ways to keep us as proletarians.

It totally captured my mind exactly what would come about from cyberpunk enthusiasts: What styles and motifs were going to define the cyberpunk of the 2000s? What new, avant-garde forms of it were going to be seen and what art style can I steal for all of my DeviantArt portfolio? In reality, I wasn’t thinking about any of these things because I was still a kid whose entire world centered around trying to fit in a schedule that’d allow me to unlock Sonic in Super Smash Bros. Melee. But, with what media I was passively exposed do during this vulnerable moment of my life was a video game that inspired me years later to set the groundwork for what I believe to be an independent sub-genre of Y2K on its own: Jet Set Radio.

Released on June 29, 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast, Jet Set Radio makes no mishaps in its presentation; it wants you to know exactly what it is as soon as you launch it, though we never had a strong grasp on what it is. We could always define how the game impacted us just by visuals alone, but we did it in isolated gestures of visual appeal or basing it off of something unlike it to draw comparisons. “It’s, um, kinda like Tony Hawk? But it’s, like, a Tony Hawk game if it was set in the future in a cybernetic version of Tokyo? But it’s not actually Tokyo, it’s something called Tokyo-to.” Heavens knows that I’ve always struggled to define it myself, but after its period has passed culturally, I usually lump it in with any media that went for the same cyberpunk format that it went for without explaining how it differs greatly.

Regardless of my attempts to convey my insatiable love for this game’s art-style and its chosen assets, they don’t change the core of what the game appears as to anyone who hasn’t been made familiar with the era it was born from. On the surface, it’s a game about punks who skate around the streets of a futuristic city on huge inline skates while spraying graffiti everywhere to the tunes of manic turntablism. The first thing an outsider might notice about the game is it’s used of cel-shaded visuals: A style of light rendering in which 3D objects are made to look flat and cartoony by using less shading color and resorting to a gradient or flat tints. Jet Set Radio was unique in this decision because it’s reportedly one of the first games to ever use the method to its benefit. Clearly, this experimental rendering (for the time) worked, otherwise I wouldn’t be gushing about how well it contributed to this specific image of a subset I’m trying to convey to you.

TGS screenshots of Jet Set Radio (Source: Polygon).

The game’s assets are just as important to contributing to its aesthetics as its method for rendering such aesthetics, so I’ll briefly describe them here. From interviews by the game designers, their primary focus was “on capturing the street culture they saw in Japan at the time: Hip-hop, punk, and electronic music and culture were the driving stylistic influences of the game. One of the designers even said they had the style down before ever trying to develop the gameplay.” [2] Clearly, the game’s cyberpunk spirit shows itself in the approach of the developers; they knew that laying down a firm style was gonna give the game its identity regardless of how well the mechanics could’ve been programmed. By focusing on the “lowlife” of Japan’s urbanity, they’ve committed themselves to the cyberpunk spirit, but with how they chose to paint the world of Tokyo-to, they had some insight that they were developing something soon to become reminiscent of the cultural period— something that the Y2K Era could call its lovechild.

One can surmise that the game can be classified as an example of performing “style over substance” beautifully [2], as the base mechanics of the game are rather simple: You skate around Tokyo-to and you do wicked movement while you spray over the city to claim it as your turf, all while avoiding the police in an attempt to stomp the Rokkaku (the bad guys). The story isn’t too epic either, but it’s suitable: It’s a tale of two rival radio stations, and one then attempts to conquer the world with a vinyl that summons demons — the usual. Let’s be honest, if it weren’t for the game’s exquisite unawareness of what new rendering style it was setting a precedent for, then it would’ve been a forgettable Sega IP. But, the importance placed on its presentation and visual essence during its development clearly calls for more publicized analysis and graspable terminology to define what many people adore (including me).

“That soundtrack, combined with the bright, graffiti-inflected visual style, gives the whole game the sensibility of a music video. As you skate around the stages at high speeds, marking the world as yours, it captures that sense that I had on the skating rink as a kid, the feeling that the cheesy music was playing for me. It makes you the axis around which the whole world is turning. If Jet Set Radio is a music video, you’re the star, an avatar of pop’s glorious presence in the world. And when the police start chasing you for being young and rowdy and tagging the place up, as police are wont to do, especially in cheesy music videos, you are always a little faster, a little cooler.” Julie Muncy [3]

I assume you, the reader, are already well-acquainted with Jet Set Radio because you saw the thumbnail with official artwork from the game and were drawn in. Therefore, I won’t spend too much time delving into the game’s plot and theming (and potentially spoil it), but it’s obvious that the game is a unique form of cyberpunk, and that it has the typical, anti-capitalist theming of a cyberpunk work. So, what I’ll focus on here instead is making summarized statements about the impact Jet Set Radio had on the Y2K Era, video game culture, and the eventually on defining the aesthetic movement it conglomerated with unknowingly.

Just to reiterate how much the developer team cared about capturing what they were going for, “Eric Haze, an artist who famously designed album art for the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, among others, was consulted by developers Smilebit in order to form the aesthetic.” [3] As much as we can dwell on just how important the aesthetic was to the developers, we have to talk about how important the decision was to use cel-shading as the primary rendering technique. List off how many games you know today that utilize cel-shading for their visuals. I can name multiple: Borderlands, Bastion, Hob, the Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Team Fortress 2, Call of Juarez, Crackdown, most Dragon Quest games, most Dragon Ball Z games, and some Fire Emblem games. That list contains some pretty big-name franchises and iterations, most of which became visually recognizable because of their boldness to use cel-shading that likely never would’ve been done if it weren’t for its use within Jet Set Radio. The best recent example I can cite for well-done cel-shading is Dragon Ball FighterZ, which utilizes it so well that the game looks damn-well near the show in most screenshots.

Another aesthetic trope that Jet Set Radio may have helped to pioneer was contributing to the greater design trend of large, 3D cities as sprawling game environments in a unique and redefined way. The popularization of these layouts came about because of the more powerful hardware of this period: Open-world cities were now a viable and popular option thanks to the performance of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto. What Jet Set Radio did to make this design its own was by the incorporating it with the game’s movement mechanics of wacky and exhilarating monorail travel: It took the free and incredibly flexible movement of the Tony Hawk games and blasted it into the technological progress that’d come about from the Y2K Era.

And I couldn’t gush about Jet Set Radio and not mention the soundtrack. “There are meaningful touchstones of comparison, is what I’m saying, places where games and music can maybe and should overlap. And by incorporating the sound and styles of different strains of youth-oriented popular music, Jet Set Radio gets it right.” [3] Having a soundtrack that consists of original and licensed songs that entailed J-pop, ’90s hip-hop, funk, electronic dance, rock acid jazz, and trip-hop, one can tell they were creating a snappy yet timeless score that’d appeal to the lowlifes of the Y2K Era. And because I was a lowlife of the Y2K Era, it was a pivotal part in developing my musical tastes. It’s what finally broke me away from listening to Moving Too Fast by Artful Dodger on repeat every weekend morning.

Clearly, the soundtrack for Cyberskater would be a nothing less of the emerging prominence of hip-hop as the dominant form of popular music in America, while also keeping with the wild experimentation and blossoming of digital music reminiscent of this time. Once, this was the language of the Y2K Era, but in the form it’ll take on here, it’ll become the music of cyberpunk: This version of it. Speaking of music, I feel playing some of that Cyberskater music will ease my nerves a little bit after being a dork for multiple minutes. I want rap, but I don’t just want regular rap. I want something more: I want something that lead to the popularization of the Afrofuturist art movement and cemented the fact that not only was the Y2K Era a time for technological progress but social progress too (or as far as you can get with American liberalism).