The Time a Bus Company tried to get Jet Set Radio Banned in the United Kingdom

While modern Sega tends to stick to the straight and narrow (i.e. reboot Sonic every other year, say they'll give us a new Crazy Taxi but only if it's some live service guff), they've certainly had some contentious moments throughout their history. At this point we've all heard about the United States Senate hearings concerning Night Trap. Throw a stone at YouTube and it's bound to land on a video covering the topic for the umpteenth time, not to mention countless deep dives into the Japanese multinational's various crappy business decisions. If you want to talk real controversial Sega history, how about the time they threatened a poor, innocent Dreamcast fansite with legal action? We're not still bitter or anything...

During the Dreamcast era, Sega found themselves in the sights of the city of Milwaukee's Common Council, who petitioned them to cancel the release of Smilebit's Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio, as it was known there in the US). The council claimed that the game would glamorise the act of graffiti tagging, with the fear being that it would encourage the young bucks of Milwaukee (geddit?) to transfer their petty vandalism from the virtual walls of Tokyo-To to the streets of Milwaukee itself. Ultimately, the game wasn't cancelled, but Tom's article on the whole saga is definitely worth a read.

The youths are going to graffiti your gran!

For a long time, we here at the Junkyard thought that was the extent of the concern surrounding Jet Set Radio's apparent mission to turn the youth of 2000 into mindless paint-spraying zombies. This was until Antosk8er in our Discord shared something very interesting that we'd never seen before. Turns out there were some powers that be attempting to get Jet Set Radio withdrawn from sale here in the United Kingdom too...

What Antosk8er found was a PDF of a report dated May 2002 from the London Assembly Graffiti Investigative Committee titled "Graffiti in London". The committee in question, which was comprised of three politicians - each from one of the three main political parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats) - was established in 2001 with the goal to “investigate graffiti across London, examining examples of best practice in its prevention and removal".

To be fair, those tags are pretty shit.

While I can definitely appreciate the artistry behind graffiti (no, this does not confirm that I am in fact Banksy), I can sympathise with the reasoning behind the establishment of this committee. In the foreword of the report, a 2001 survey is cited, which said that 77% of Londoners listed graffiti as “a quality of life concern". The report also mentions that "local authorities, transport organisations, businesses and private individuals [were] spending millions of pounds each year trying to prevent and remove it." But who needs money when you've got graffiti soul?

The report also painted a dreary picture of the effect graffiti was having on Londoners. "Graffiti has a negative effect on the lives of the thousands of Londoners who travel in vandalised, unpleasant buses and trains, and live in areas blighted by graffiti." And this, my sweet soul brothers, is where Jet Set Radio came into the picture.

Every Japanese DC Game in one video! Sort of.

The Dreamcast History Project is going to take some work, so to tide you over until I eventually get as many of the Japanese Dreamcast releases on the timeline as possible, here's a video containing almost all of them in chronological order (I cut out some re-releases). You most likely won't recognize a lot of them and to be honest I don't either: I'm actually quite surprised just how many there is, especially in the later years. There is tons of dodgy anime dating sim stuff in there that I mostly don't know the names of, as well as a lot of other junk that we never got, and there's quite a few games we know well that are missing because Japan didn't get them. Can you believe they never got MSR but did get Spirit of Speed 1937? What's that all about?

The Dreamcast History Project

Yesterday I stumbled across this archive on Sega's Japanese website that lists every single game released for the Dreamcast in Japan by release date with box art, so being the obsessive compulsive I am, I decided to save every single one of the 500 and something front covers. Then this morning I decided to hunt down this online program I saw used for something about the history of animation called Dipity, which lets you create a full interactive timeline with images, info, video etc. It's really simple to use and all of today I've been working on a timeline of the Dreamcast's many game releases, starting with for now all the Japanese ones which I have these cover images and release dates for.

Consider this my late present for the Dreamcast's 10th birthday. It's a work in progress but there is already quite a few entries there (all of 1998, most of 1999, some of 2000 and most of the latter years), mainly just showing the box art and on some a wikipedia link, but I plan to take the descriptions from the long dead Dreamcast Junkyard wiki and add them to the games info too. This may take quite a while so i might need some help with it, especially for hunting down the English language names for a lot of the games (most are on segagagadomain, at least). I'll see how I do.

So try it out, I've embedded it above. The further you zoom (I find the 1 month setting is the best), the more you'll see. There's also a flipbook which lets you look at the covers much bigger, and a list, it's all very clever how it works. It really does show just how quickly all our favorite DC games were crammed onto the market, with many weeks featuring about 3 great games at a time.