Jet Set Radio Graffiti

Jet Set Radio, originally released in North America as Jet Grind Radio, is a 2000 action video game developed by Smilebit and published by Sega for the Dreamcast. The player controls a member of a youth gang, the GGs, as they use inline skates to traverse Tokyo, spraying graffiti and evading authorities.

Graffiti plays an important role in the game: most objectives involve "tagging" different locations of the map, and enemies can be defeated by spraying them as well. Sega brought various artists on to design elaborate graffiti art patterns that the player can unlock to customize their style. There was even a "design your own" graffiti art tool built-in, and custom tags could be uploaded to Sega's website for other users to copy to their own game.

In 2010 the game was ported to several more modern platforms, including PC, Android, and home game console. As a promotion Sega launched a contest for the public to submit new graffiti designs. All entries were posted to Sega's Flickr account, and the top entries were included in the remaster. The winner announcement was made by YouTube video.

The process to extract and replace graffiti with custom designs has been done before, but nobody I've found has actually collected and shared the complete graffiti collection from the game. So, I obtained a copy of JSR for PC from Steam, wrote a custom tool to extract the graffiti images, converted to PNG, and uploaded them here.

Technical Details

JSR graffiti (at least, the "HD Remaster" versions) is stored as uncompressed ARGB data (4bpp) in AFS archives within the DATA/ subfolder. Each pixel is 2 bytes, with each nibble giving alpha, red, green and blue channel values from 0x00 to 0x0F. Assuming the files are read as big-endian (i386 byte order), this Perl code extracts a pixel from an unsigned short.

      my ($a, $r, $g, $b) = (
        ($pixel & 0xF000) >> 12,
        ($pixel & 0x0F00) >> 8,
        ($pixel & 0x00F0) >> 4,
        ($pixel & 0x000F)
      );

Graffiti comes in three sizes: 512x128, 256x128 and 128x128. The dimensions are simply determined by file size: 128k, 64k or 32k (respectively). AFS files containing graffiti are:

GRF.AFS - Japanese region graffiti
E_GRF.AFS - European region graffiti
U_GRF.AFS - US region graffiti
GRF_CONTEST.AFS - Graffiti contest information
E_GRF_SAMSUNG.AFS - Android-specific graffiti files (?)

To extract files from an AFS archive, you may use Noesis. There are several duplicates across these files, because most graffiti images are the same between the US, Japan and European regions - with slight differences that will be noted below.

.ZIP Download

You can download all graffiti images on this page in one .zip file here: JSRGraffiti.zip (approx. 2MB)

US and Cross-Region Graffiti

These graffiti images are shared across all three regions. Some of these were only available in the Dreamcast version, being replaced in the 2010 ports by the winners of the Graffiti Contest. This was possibly due to license issues with the original graffiti spray. In other cases, new graffiti tags were added - for example, contest winners were assigned to Pots the Dog, who did not have his own set of tags in the Dreamcast version.

**MONKEY BUSINESS** - Don't Monkey Around!

**TOKYO UNDERGROUND** - Let's Play Ball!

**MAD BANANA** - Return of the Super Ape!

**TAKARA** - Reaching out
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Jurassic 5** - Quality control
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Mix Master Mike** - Eye of the Cyklops
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Rob Zombie** - American Made Music to Strip by
*(US, Dreamcast only)*

**PIRANHA** - Sharpest Teeth!
*(US/EU only)*

**CHEAP** - Cheap and Street
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Jurassic 5** - Rockin the decks with original beats
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Mix Master Mike** - Funky Hip-Hop Scratching
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Rob Zombie** - Call of the Zombie
*(Dreamcast only)*

**PIRANHA** - Beware My Bite!
*(US/EU only)*

**MEW** - Purr like a Kitten, Fight like a Tiger!
*(US/EU only)*

**SLATE** - Ya Gotta Cheat to Solve Puzzles

**SICK PUPPY** - How Much is That Mutt in the Window?

**BABOO** - It's Epidemic
*(Dreamcast only)*

**CHUPA CHUPOP!** - Be Bop
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Jurassic 5** - The world famous beat junkies
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Mix Master Mike** - MIXMASTERMIKE
*(Dreamcast only)*

**Rob Zombie** - House of 1000 Corpses
*(US, Dreamcast only)*

**NOISE TANK** - It's a Wonderful Chemical World

EU / Japan Graffiti

The soundtrack for EU and Japan was slightly different from the US version. Some tags were replaced as a result.

"BoomBox Records"
*(replaces the Rob Zombie XL tag; BoomBox Records is the label for EU/JP-only song "Funky Plucker" by Semi Detached)*

"Catskills Records"
*(replaces the Rob Zombie S tag; Catskills Records is the label for EU/JP-only song "Recipe for the Perfect Afro" by Feature Cast)*

Japan-Only Graffiti

These graffiti sprays were extracted from GRF.AFS. This is the Japan region file. Some characters in the Japanese version had different names, and some soundtracks were different as well.

"(Unknown)"
*(replaces the Piranha L tag; Piranha is called Sugar in the JP version)*

"Corn"
*(replaces the Tab S tag; Tab is called Corn in the JP version)*

"Sugar"
*(replaces the Piranha S tag; Piranha is called Sugar in the JP version)*

"Bis"
*(replaces the Mew S tag; Mew is called Bliss in the JP version)*

Graffiti Contest Winners

These are the winners of the Graffiti Contest. They were extracted from E_GRF.AFS.

Graffiti Contest Images

These images, from GRF_CONTEST.AFS, advertise for the 2010 Graffiti Contest. The second set indicates that the closing date has passed.

Samsung UI Images

These three images are coded as graffiti files, but appear to be intended for some other social function added to the game's later porting. They are taken from GRF_SAMSUNG.AFS.