I waited for him on a street corner in Shibuya. It was the spring of 2000 – my first time in Japan. I was attending the Tokyo Game Show as editor of DC-UK magazine. Somehow I’d managed to score an interview with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the impossibly cool Sega designer, once an upcoming arcade star, working on titles such as Sega Rally and Touring Car Championship, but now a wayward pioneer, leading his team at United Game Artists on Space Channel 5 and Rez.
I knew about Mizuguchi as a designer of course, but also as a person – a few years before, he’d made friends with my then-editor at Edge, Jason Brookes. The two went clubbing together in Tokyo, London and Bristol, both equally absorbed by the late-1990s dance music culture. I’d heard wild tales of their adventures. The year before my Tokyo trip, Jason and Edge writer Simon Cox had visited Mizuguchi’s studio, and, just before the trio hit some weird hippy trance club, Mizuguchi showed them an early version of Rez.
“He said he didn’t have a name for it yet, but the placeholder music was Underworld’s Cowgirl/Rez,” recalls Simon. “I said he should call it Rez because of the track but also because it reminded me of Tron and when you die in that you’re de-rezzed. Tetsuya loved the idea. He was asked about it years later and couldn’t remember exactly who named it, but Jase reminded him I think. Anyway we both got mentions in the credits.”
It was Simon who’d got me the meeting with Mizuguchi and he was due to catch up with us later. For now, I was standing on this corner, watching the crowds rush by, thinking about Rez. And then, striding along a vast pedestrian crossing came Mizuguchi himself, his long coat flapping in the evening breeze, a giant video screen reflected in his sunglasses. That moment, that one moment of utter cool and anticipation, symbolised for me the Sega of 1999 and 2000. The Sega of the Dreamcast era. There was something about the Dreamcast, and the games Sega made during this period, that felt utterly local, utterly beholden to the Tokyo aesthetic. Space Channel 5 was a key example, its sleek 1960s retrofuturism, its gachapon-gift aliens, it’s candy-coloured kawaii-fierce lead character, all drawing on the design culture of the city, while also referencing everything from Doraemon to Barberalla.
Jet Set Radio, one of the first open-world-ish action-adventure games, chose as its milieu the city’s most famous districts – Shibuya and Shinjuku. With a development team made up almost entirely of twenty-somethings, director Masayoshi Kikuchi set out to capture what was truly cool about these areas; the vibe, the visual dynamism, the incredible effervescence, but also the dirt and grunge. This was a Tokyo of speed and neon, but also bus stations and concrete underpasses. It was fantastical but grounded in a way only natives could know. The game’s stars were skaters and rappers, dressed in hi-tech variations on the Ganguro and Bōsōzoku street fashions of the era. The art team made the best use yet of cell-shaded visuals, containing the characters’ super-flourescent colours, striped dresses and logo t-shirts within buzzing black outlines, like hastily caught sketches.