As a teenager growing up in Laren, a town of a little over 10,000 people in North Holland, Dion Koster didn’t have much to do. But he did develop a few passionate, interrelated interests: skateboarding, breakdancing, hip-hop and graffiti. So when Sega released Jet Set Radio Future on the Xbox in the winter of 2002 — a remake of the Dreamcast title Jet Set Radio about music-pumping, graffiti-tagging skater gangs in futuristic Tokyo – the 13-year-old Koster could hardly believe his luck. It was as if the game had been made for him.
“It really entranced me,” he says. “It took all the things that me and my friends were doing and threw it into the future. It added technology. It added the cyber to the funk.”
Koster has channelled that revelation into the forthcoming Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Developed by Team Reptile, the mid-sized independent studio he co-founded with Tim Remmers in the Dutch town of Hilversum in 2011, Bomb Rush is a brisk, brightly saturated, highly kinetic action game about rival graffiti gangs in the futuristic metropolis of New Amsterdam. You run, bike, skate or dance your way through the sprawling cel-shaded cityscape, tagging buildings and subway cars, assembling crews and stringing together trick combos to earn points that increase your street rep. It’s immediately obvious that the game is a love letter to the passions of Koster’s youth – as well as a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future, with which Bomb Rush shares much of its basic DNA.
Bomb Rush was first unveiled in the summer of 2020, and has been many years in the making. Koster says that while he dreamed of making it even earlier, the scale of the project had always seemed prohibitive for a developer of Team Reptile’s size. The studio started small, developing modest, likable fighting games such as Megabyte Punch. It was only after the release of Lethal League Blaze, Team Reptile’s slick, expansive sequel to the studio’s enormously successful indie fighting game Lethal League, that Koster felt the team had scaled up to a level where something like Bomb Rush might be feasible. “After we finished Blaze, we had the funds, and it felt like we were in a safe position,” he says. “We could afford to take a risk.”
And risky it is. Koster admits that making a game inspired by a somewhat obscure cult title from over 20 years ago “that didn’t sell enough to have a sequel” is an ambitious proposition. But he and the team were clear from the start that Bomb Rush would chiefly be a passion project. “I was always like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be a niche thing, but it’s from the heart, so I’m going to make it anyway,’” he laughs. After several years in the throes of production – including a delay from its scheduled 2022 release date due to Covid-era setbacks and snags related to “getting used to a much bigger team” – Koster seems relieved that his vision will soon be out in the wild for all the world to see.
If people don’t understand that vision, so be it – Bomb Rush is personal, and he’s put too much of himself into it to mind too much what other people think. “This is what we wanted to make,” he says. “If people hate it, I don’t care. I’m going to make more of it.”
• Bomb Rush CyberFunk is released on PC, PS4, Xbox, Switch, summer 2023.
