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Right when we made Jet Set Radio,
at around the end of the '90s,
the pop culture was great,
as was the youth culture in Tokyo.
There was a lot of dynamism and high energy,
vibrant colors.
It was a period when cute character kind of things were really popular.
And the music also was a mixture.
It was a period where a kind of fusion of big beat,
rock and DJ culture
was extremely popular.
And, among them,
the hip-hop culture of a little earlier,
entered a bit of a revival and was exactly
the music that I liked at the time,
and it influenced me in many ways.
So, with the game, I kind of wanted to broadcast to the world
what I felt at that time in my youth,
an image of what was popular in Tokyo then.
We started to shape it from visual impact
and imaging. So in the beginning,
for the inline skate game,
we had only a vague idea.
I don't know if the graffiti element was there,
I'm not sure if it was there or not.
The point is, we could have made it into an adventure game
or an RPG.
I don't think there was a shooter.
We thought of many scenarios.
But rather than make it a complicated game,
we wanted to make it a simple game.
Through trial and error, we came up with a fun game
of simply drawing illustrations,
or a fun game where you simply stroll through a city.
We created a lot through trial and error,
but nothing interesting came out of it.
When we showed our boss something that wasn't very interesting,
he got really mad at us!
"Are you sure you can do this?"
Up until then, I had no experience
leading a team or creating a game.
I worked as a team member
while I continued to lead the team and learn through trial and error.
But I had to create a core part that everyone would find interesting first.
Getting to that point really took a lot of time.
Originally, when 3-D games
came out one after the other, from a number of companies,
the end objective was that everyone wanted to create a real...
A highly realistic world.
That was the direction we were all going in.
But, we wanted to offer something different.
In the very beginning, of course, speaking of Japan,
its manga and anime culture and things like that
are very strong. So, I thought
that I'd like to create a game which somehow
cleverly transformed this and refined it.
Then I researched various computer graphics techniques
and of these, I thought that cel-shading
was perfect and would really catch on.
So, it was really... Well...
Using cel-shading on the Dreamcast at that time
was extremely challenging.
Moreover, I can say that it worked out well, but
we were lucky that we could reproduce it, so I think it was great.
Well, in games these days, for example,
characters with incredible backstories, where the person came from,
what kind of family he has, what he thinks about,
is the norm in character creation, I think.
At that time, when I was making the character,
what I thought was that I wanted to make it more like an icon.
In other words, not like a human
but a character like a symbol. I thought about this a lot.
A representation.
I like all the characters, I like each of the various stages.
I had to balance each character.
This character's here, so I have to have this character there.
I made stage concepts with relationships between characters.
Rather than say that I like this as a whole,
I think that creating it with a balance worked well.
Things like inline skates
and graffiti...
First of all, America was
a great inspiration. That cultural backdrop portion
was a reference portion that we drew from,
so we wanted to create a segment of an American city.
The makeup of the game demanded dense streets, or it wouldn't work.
For example, if it were Los Angeles,
or San Francisco, or somewhere,
it had to have tall, densely packed buildings to give it a three-dimensional structure.
What's a good example? Bridges up above, roads going in a line like this.
A city with that kind of three-dimensional structure was
essential to the game.
When you think about that,
New York naturally comes to mind. Yes. We've arrived.
Yes! There is. There is a really hip,
and cool image.
And that kind of hipness,
coolness and fun
I worked hard to put into the songs, as well.
Well, I played with the voices a lot.
I chopped up the voices and placed them in a different order.
They became completely meaningless words,
and I chuckled to myself late at night as I worked on them.
I laughed and composed, that's right.