Smilebit | Code Like It's 198x

Smilebit made one of the Dreamcast’s best-remembered games and then took its sequel to a rival’s console. Jet Set Radio (2000) sent teenage skaters around a cartoon Tokyo spraying graffiti, drawn with the flat colours and black outlines of cel-shading, still a new technique at the time. Edge told its readers to “expect imitations”. The game sold poorly. When Sega stopped making consoles, Smilebit moved to Microsoft’s Xbox and made three games for it: Jet Set Radio Future, GunValkyrie and Panzer Dragoon Orta. All the while, the same company was making the football and baseball management games that sold in Japan. Sega took it back into the parent company in 2004.

Fast facts

Active: 2000 to 2004, as one of the development companies Sega set up in 2000.
Staff: 105 in 2000, about a third of them from the former Sega PC division, Smilebit told Edge.
Name: “smile”, for players’ enjoyment, and “bit” for something digital.
Dreamcast: Jet Set Radio (2000), The Typing of the Dead (2000), Hundred Swords (2001) and Sega’s sports management games for Japan.
Xbox: Jet Set Radio Future (2002), GunValkyrie (2002) and Panzer Dragoon Orta (2002 in Japan, 2003 in Europe).
People: producer Takayuki Kawagoe, director Masayoshi Kikuchi and art director Ryuta Ueda on the Jet Set Radio games; Shun Arai on GunValkyrie.
Afterwards: absorbed into Sega in July 2004.

The Panzer Dragoon team

Some of Smilebit’s people had worked together for years. When Edge met the Jet Set Radio team in the spring of 2000, the producer, Takayuki Kawagoe, explained that they had worked on Panzer Dragoon II Zwei and Azel (known in the West as Panzer Dragoon Saga), and then on the Dreamcast version of Sega Rally 2. The art producer, Ryuta Ueda, had joined for Zwei. Ueda said he had joined Sega after seeing how much Sonic was liked abroad, especially in British magazines.

The company itself was a mixture. An executive interviewed by Edge in October 2000 said that Smilebit was “mainly based on the former Sega PC”, which made up about a third of its 105 staff, and that it had taken over some of Sega’s most successful series. He was also designing an online game, Hundred Swords, to support Sega’s network plans, and he chose the name himself. He wanted players to be happy, so he wanted the word “smile”; but “smile is not serious enough on its own”, so he added “bit” for a digital image. “Of course, as a separate company it is vital to make Smilebit games,” he said, “but we mustn’t forget to include the Sega flavour in each of our titles.”

Jet Set Radio

Jet Set Radio came out in Japan in the summer of 2000. Edge gave it eight out of ten, and found “a depth and vibrancy that can be breathtaking” beneath its “vivid cartoon graphics and much-lauded cel shading”. Players skate around districts of a city, spraying tags over rival gangs’ graffiti while the police close in, to a soundtrack of funk and hip-hop by Hideki Naganuma. Retro Gamer later called it one of the Dreamcast’s most exciting and innovative games, and noted that “upon Jet Set Radio’s original release, cel-shading was a relatively new rendering technique”.

It did not sell. “Jet Set Radio may have been a landmark title, but sales were poor,” Edge wrote in 2001, and Retro Gamer agreed that “despite attracting a cult following, Jet Set Radio wasn’t a hit”.

Moving to the Xbox

In January 2001 Sega announced that it would stop making the Dreamcast and publish games for other companies’ consoles. Smilebit’s next three games were for Microsoft’s new Xbox.

Edge visited for Jet Set Radio Future in the summer of 2001. The team had made the demo shown at E3 “in four weeks with limited knowledge of the machine”, Kawagoe said, and the scenery had four times as many polygons as on the Dreamcast, around 70,000 for the background alone. The director, Masayoshi Kikuchi, missed the old arrangement: “It was so easy until now on Dreamcast. We could have the answer so quickly. All we had to do was go a few floors down and ask. Now it takes too much time.” Kikuchi promised more freedom than in the first game, with players encouraged to explore “every alleyway and rooftop” instead of following rigid missions. Jet Set Radio Future came out in February 2002, and Edge gave it eight out of ten.

GunValkyrie had first been planned for the Dreamcast, Retro Gamer reported. Shun Arai demonstrated it at Microsoft’s X01 event in Cannes in 2001 and admitted that the film Starship Troopers was one of its inspirations. The player steers a soldier in a rocket-boosted suit through swarms of insect-like enemies, using both analogue sticks and a boost that runs out quickly. Edge gave it five out of ten. Retro Gamer later called it “highly underrated” but “certainly not an easy game to master”.

Panzer Dragoon Orta brought back the dragon-riding shooter that some of Smilebit’s staff had worked on at Sega’s Team Andromeda. Edge measured it against Rez, the rail shooter made by Sega’s United Game Artists, and thought the comparison “not entirely favourable to Orta”: its new controls, including the ability to change between three dragon forms, made the action more complicated. “Anyone awaiting an on-rails shooter that’s as accomplished as Rez will feel underwhelmed,” the review concluded, “but Panzer enthusiasts will be delighted.” The disc included the original Saturn Panzer Dragoon as an unlockable extra.

Sports, and the end

Smilebit’s other games got little attention in the British press but were the main part of its work. Sega Retro lists Japanese football, baseball and horse-racing management series such as J.League Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurou! and Pro Yakyuu Team o Tsukurou! across the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Game Boy Advance and PC, as well as The Typing of the Dead and its PC sequels.

In October 2003, Sega Retro records, a reorganisation made Smilebit a sports-only developer. The Panzer Dragoon and Jet Set Radio staff moved to Sega’s Amusement Vision, taking an unfinished skateboarding arcade game, Ollie King, with them. In July 2004 Smilebit was folded back into Sega Corporation as Smilebit Div, and in November 2004 it was renamed Sega Sports Design R&D Dept.

Sources

Edge issue 84, May 2000, pp. 36–39: Jet Set Radio preview and interview (Takayuki Kawagoe, Ryuta Ueda, Kazuki Hosokawa, Masayoshi Kikuchi; Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, Azel and Sega Rally 2; cel rendering).
Edge issue 88, September 2000, pp. 86–87: Jet Set Radio review (developer Smilebit; eight out of ten; “expect imitations”); reprinted in the Edge collector’s edition of 2001, p. 90 (“a depth and vibrancy that can be breathtaking”).
Edge issue 89, October 2000, p. 75: interview with a Smilebit executive (the name, 105 staff, the former Sega PC, Hundred Swords, “a separate company”).
Edge issue 100, August 2001, pp. 35–39: Jet Set Radio Future preview (“sales were poor”; the four-week E3 demo; 70,000 polygons; Kikuchi on working on another company’s hardware; Hideki Naganuma).
Edge issue 95, March 2001, pp. 8–9: Sega’s announcements of January 2001 that it would stop making the Dreamcast.
Edge issue 105, Christmas 2001, p. 30: GunValkyrie at X01 in Cannes (Shun Arai; Starship Troopers).
Edge issue 108, March 2002, pp. 70–71: Jet Set Radio Future review (eight out of ten).
Edge issue 110, May 2002, p. 74: GunValkyrie review (five out of ten).
Edge issue 120, February 2003, pp. 78–79: Panzer Dragoon Orta review.
Retro Gamer issue 101, 2012, pp. 78–79: “Future Classic: Jet Set Radio Future” (cel-shading “a relatively new rendering technique”; “wasn’t a hit”; Jet Set Radio Future released in February 2002).
Retro Gamer issue 111, 2013, p. 68: GunValkyrie (originally planned for the Dreamcast; “highly underrated”).
Retro: The Ultimate Retro Companion, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008), pp. 22–25: John Szczepaniak on the Panzer Dragoon series (Smilebit and Orta; the original game as an extra).
Sega Retro, “Smilebit” (database, web, secondary): foundation in April 2000; the softography; the October 2003 reorganisation and Ollie King; Smilebit Div in July 2004 and Sega Sports Design R&D Dept. in November 2004, citing Sega’s investor-relations documents. https://segaretro.org/Smilebit