The Japanese company will be rebooting several franchises, and has set relatively high expectations for each one.

At The Game Awards, SEGA confirmed with a video that Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Shinobi and Crazy Taxi will be rebooted. Only two of these were seriously present on the SEGA Dreamcast, the company’s last console (the mini Mega Drive/Genesis consoles don’t count as new hardware), so Jet Set Radio (continued on the Xbox as Jet Set Radio Future for the “greens”) and Crazy Taxi can be called the most recent, if we only look at “domestic” hardware.

But two decades have passed since then, and SEGA knows that something should be done with the old IPs. Shuji Utsumi, CEO of SEGA’s US subsidiary and co-COO of the parent company, told the Washington Post how they would approach these IPs: “We really want to show an edgy, rebellious attitude. The concept of games like Jet Set Radio is evolving. The original creators are involved again, and the time is now. It’s a good time for people to appreciate all kinds of concepts. We’ve been investing in these three titles [Persona, Sonic, Yakuza] for the past three years to make these pillars grow, and they’ve grown very well. We are currently evaluating Virtua Fighter. It doesn’t use as many tricks and special moves as Street Fighter, it’s very realistic. How can we make it more dramatic? That’s something we’re working on,” Utsumi said.

It’s worth noting that Utsumi confirmed that several of the original Jet Set Radio developers are working on the reboot, so maybe it won’t be so different that it can’t be considered a reboot worthy of the IP… which was leaked back in April, but at the time it didn’t seem very certain whether it would be a remaster or a full-blown reboot, but last year Bloomberg reported that Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio were being made into big-budget reboots.

We’ll see how successful the reboots are.

Source: VGC