You know what I might have most about games? There’s no universal way to play them. You buy a DVD, you buy a DVD player, and aside from maybe a region lock issue you’re as good as gold. If I buy Snowboard Kids for the N64, and I don’t have one of those, well, I’m up a particular creek. That has meant that many a game over the years has been stuck to particular platforms, one of the most surprising being Jet Set Radio Future, to this day a game that’s still only available on the original Xbox, and the Xbox 360 through backwards compatibility. But! Thanks to some techy wizards, that might change in the near future.

That’s because of a decompilation project that is currently underway for the North American release of the game. Now, I’m a far cry from those tech wizards I mentioned, but as far as I understand it, decompiling a game is a process where a game is taken apart so that it can be rebuilt. This allows for things like native PC ports of games that maybe never had any, which, in this case for Jet Set Radio Future, is something that could one day be an option.

Right now, according to the project’s Codeberg page, the decompilation process itself is about 30% done, but these kinds of projects normally take quite a while, so don’t expect it to be finished any time soon. And again, decompiling doesn’t mean that a PC port will be ready to go right out the gate either.

Still, it would be nice to free this one from defunct platform prison. There are obviously excellent spiritual successors like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, yet sometimes going straight to the source is what you need. It’s also just a unique way to preserve a game, even if not the intended way to experience it.