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.”
