Jet Set Radio's unique world is why it can never be Fortnite

One of the more tragic things I did during lockdown involved loading up Jet Set Radio Future for the first time in an age and playing through it with my phone by my side. Partly I just wanted to feel the game under my feet again – that hectic, freewheeling pleasure of city space and cold night air. Partly, though, I wanted to take phone pictures of Tokyo-To as a tourist would. I ended up taking screenshots of the actual screen. Snap!

Okay: so while I was doing this, it felt super stupid. If I already sound like an idiot here – and I’m pretty sure I do m8s! – I definitely felt like one. It was not at all like being a tourist in a city. It was instead very much like being a strange man sat in his living room, pointing his phone at a TV screen.

And yet! Here’s the thing. It sort of worked. It just didn’t work at that moment. I played Jet Set Radio Future with my cameraphone to feel like I was traveling somewhere, to feel like I was escaping from my living room, my house, my street, inevitably escaping from myself a bit. And now, months later, when I look back at the pictures on my phone – a blurry streetcorner here, Dogenzaka Hill tearing slightly as a lightbulb in the background renders the screen a pearly blue – the effect finally works. I look back at the pictures and think of the place I have been to, and the different times I have been there. What it meant to me. How it felt.

All of which is to say: like a lot of people I read the news yesterday that Sega wants to give some of its games the Fortnite treatment. Jet Set Radio is amongst them. Now: I want to clarify, slightly awkwardly, what I’m trying to do here. I don’t for a minute think that Sega is just going to dump Jet Set into the Fortnite structure. I don’t think you’re going to get Tokyo-To as an island, as it were, with you dropping in to battle dozens of other people. I don’t know the first thing about business or game design, so I would never want to pretend to have an idea of how any of this will turn out.

What I want to tell you about is slightly different: for a few minutes this morning I thought about Jet Set Radio through the lens of Fortnite. Not the hundred-player jazz, just the geography. I wondered how Tokyo-To would work as a Fortnite island. And the reason I’m mentioning this at all is because, just by thinking it about it, I ended up feeling that I understood both games a little better.