Jet Set Radio went on sale in Japan on June 29, 2000. The man who directed it, Masayoshi Kikuchi, had never directed a game before. Accounts of the project agree on that point. They also agree that it cost him something at the start.
The studio was Smilebit, a Sega team formed from members of Team Andromeda, the group behind the Panzer Dragoon games on the Saturn. The Jet Set Radio staff numbered fewer than twenty-five people, and their average age was under twenty-five. Kikuchi was leading a young team with no directing experience of his own to lean on.
The look of the game was settled before the play of it. That is an unusual order, and it left the early concepts without a clear game inside them. According to the accounts of the project, his superiors were not pleased with what they first saw. Kikuchi went on by trial and error, looking for an idea he believed everyone would find interesting. Where that idea finally came from is not recorded in the sources we could reach.
What the team made was a Tokyo drawn in flat colour and hard outlines. The studio built a cel-shading technique that had not been used before, and put thicker lines on the objects that needed to stand out. Kikuchi later said that making the open town was 'very difficult from a programming standpoint.' He had picked a hard road for a team that had not yet shipped anything together.
When he looked back, the aim he gave was not to win over a foreign audience. In his words, the team wanted to 'tread uncharted territory in gaming as a whole.' That is a plain statement of intent. It does not claim that anyone knew in advance whether the territory would pay.
It paid slowly. Reviewers abroad praised the game and players at overseas events like E3 responded warmly, but Kikuchi said he did not get the impression that acclaim 'necessarily meant more sales.' Across every version and re-release, the game has since passed one million copies worldwide. In 2000 nobody could have counted that far ahead.
One thing from that first summer he remembered clearly. 'Right after it was released we got letters in French and in German.' A game made by fewer than twenty-five young people in Japan had reached readers who wrote back in languages nobody on the team had planned for.
After Smilebit was folded back into Sega, Kikuchi went on to work under Toshihiro Nagoshi, and his later credits are on larger projects, including the Yakuza series. The sources we could reach do not describe what he felt about any of it, so we will not guess. What they do show is the order of events: a first-time director, a team nobody had tested, a style nobody had proven, and a stack of letters in the wrong languages. If you made something no one had asked for, whose letter would you be waiting for?