Shaping the future

Meet the studio making Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a Jet Set Radio revival with street culture 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.”