How Radio Unites and Emboldens the Counterculture in Jet Set Radio Future

Whizzing by, riding the endless twisting currents of the modern information scene, is a social media post about a strange medium. This medium is everywhere, the post explains. This medium is spooky and ancient and invisible, and it forms part of the heartbeat of the universe itself. And yet once humanity discovered it? Once we discovered it, we filled it with music.

Seconds have passed. The social media post is now lost in the churn. The currents and thermals of information race ever onwards. And yet that message, already long gone, takes a moment to untangle. A medium that’s everywhere, and we filled it with music? Radio. They’re talking about radio waves.

Games are loaded with invisible things. They’re made of code, for starters, lines of letters and numbers and symbols that we’re never meant to see. And then their worlds are filled with barriers that we can’t breach, and silent trigger points that make sure a mission happens when it’s meant to. As we move through these spaces we’re constantly grazing things that we can’t make out, but which still ensure that the whole place works.

Then there’s radio. Radio waves are invisible and, in the real world, if we stop to consider them at all, we’ll find that we’re pretty much used to the idea that they thread themselves around us and through us. What could be more mundane than the chatter of a radio coming from a nearby house, tuned to a local station?

And yet it always feels truly magical in a game like GTA when you can get into a car and turn on the radio - where you can even select the channel you want to listen to. In Oxenfree, a game about spending a long, unsettling night on an abandoned island, the radio you carry with you is perhaps the single most unsettling thing you encounter the whole time. Fire it up and turn the dial and there are all these other realities out there in the night, all of them colliding, jostling, vying for prominence. Dance hall. Distance voices. Machinery made of static. This stuff walks amongst us.