In hindsight, I was a fool for meeting Denshattack’s satirical, irreverent, downright countercultural sensibilities with surprise. Upbeat, even goofy as it is for a train driving game, it shares more common ground with skateboarding games, and while the commodification of skater culture is certainly A Thing, few skaters have ever reapplied their asphalt-eating skills to bootlicking.
What remains striking, though, is how specifically '2026' Denshattack's targets are. The main baddies are a rogue big tech company, deploying all your current favourite social ills: enforced inequality, mass surveillance, misinformation-spewing talking heads, police violence, and soulless AI replacing true craft and skill. If only it did a bit on mass layoffs, it would have had a full set. You meet them with force, too, assembling a crew that resembles a Greatest Hits of Japanese normbreaker groups while repeatedly ramming your engine through those oppressive mechanisms at top-gear Skinkansen speeds.
The result is that Denshattack manages to have it both ways, being fully capable of stretching a daft grin across your face, yet possessing a radical heart that wards off the sense – and, indeed, accusations – that this is just an ironic bit of comedy train capering. Yet according to David Jaumandreu, game director at developers Undercoders, Denshattack was never consciously given a political voice – it simply emerged, logically and naturally, from its Japan being shaped as a more locomotive-mad version of the real one.
"It maybe wasn’t deliberate, or intentional," Jaumandreu tells me. "It was just like setting up the world, what happened there, and the issues there... it was extrapolating what we're living nowadays, I guess. It's kind of a reflection of our worries."
"When we started with the game, AI wasn't as big as it is today," adds producer and designer Àngel Beltran. "We started with the prototype back in 2022, so it's cool to see some stuff that now you can link very clearly to AI and to data centres and that sort of stuff. But I think, when you embrace this skating culture, that's countercultural almost by default. There's this view of resignificating the world, and making it yours. And we always envisioned the game as taking place in a near-future version of Japan, not so distant from ours. So yeah, I think almost by accident, we ended up making a game that's very grounded in today's reality, even without being conscious about it until it was done."
The notion of making an anti-corporate game by accident becomes a bit more understandable after looking at Undercoder’s back catalogue, chiefly the satirical 2019 metroidvania SuperEpic: The Entertainment War. This needled the games industry itself, with another evil megacorp on antagonist duties – a monopolistic development house "controlling minds through abusive microtransactions" – and such boss characters as the Senior Monetization Vampire and Slave Team Builder, with "Pigcoins" serving as currency.
As with Denshattack’s AI stance, though, SuperEpic’s industry criticisms turned out more prescient than expected, with cryptocurrencies crashing hard in 2022 and gamedev executives abandoning even the pretence of we-all-row-the-boat solidarity by launching into a brutal series of post-lockdown job cuts. "The game was much more relevant two or three years after its release," Jaumandreu notes. "Sometimes you get a thought or an idea and you extend it, to the worst way possible, that you think it even looks like a parody. And three years later, unfortunately, that becomes the case."
Denshattack has evidently timed its relevance much better, and what it lacks in SuperEpic’s cynicism, it makes up for with a far wider understanding (and representation) of real-life countercultural movements. As Emi, your playable Denshattacker, ollies her way across the country, she’s joined by a growing crew of misfit champions, all pursuing the freedom and expression of illegally doing sick train flips. Rebelling teens like gyaru queen Yoshie and baseballing delinquent Madoka join forces with ageing rockabilly mechanics Shin and Fumihiko, while vengeful outlaw Yamagata rides straight out of the bōsōzoku youth motorcycling subculture – a real-life tribe for which his in-game Denshattack gang is named.
For Jaumandreu, fleshing out these outcasts – and by extension, doing justice to the groups they represent – was a matter of both research and personal experience. "I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot to Japan, for the first time in 1998, I think," he says. "I've made a lot of friends and come back [a lot]. I was working there for some time. And it’s something that shocked me, since the first time I went there, how different gangs are very, very recognisable. Like in the late 90s, whenever you went to Harajuku and Yogogi (neighbourhoods in Tokyo - Geography Ed.), you would see the gyaru girls. Like, that was the blooming [counterculture] of that time. If you went to Yogogi, or the Meiji Jingu, you would see the rockabillies dancing there. Sometimes they have these festivals that are throwbacks to the 50s and 60s, and you have them there.
"It's something that has interested me a lot. And then when we finally came into Denshattack, we had some knowledge about it, and then we went into just documenting, as best we could, all that we could about these tribes - bōsōzoku in particular. For example, there's a very very good documentary on YouTube talking about the origins, what are their views, etc. And even though some of these countercultural gangs have kind of lost popularity, and maybe in the case of bōsōzoku, lost the reasons for why they exist and how they behave themselves in a post World War era... you know, the spirit still exists. On any Friday night in Tokyo, if you live near or if you're staying near any of the big roads, you will hear them storming through the night, not letting you sleep properly!"
Denshattack gleefully – if respectfully – smashes these specifically Japanese subcultures together with a more Western-flavoured take on skateboarding culture, down to the spray-painted decals you can apply to your train (which could very feasibly have first appeared on the side of a Californian quarterpipe). Was it a challenge, I wonder, to meld such geographically distinct expressions of rebellion?
"Yeah, it was," replies Beltran, "but it was a pretty fun one, honestly. Like there were a lot of challenges combining things that are maybe not supposed to go together - like with the train doing tricks. But as David mentioned, I think when we did our research on these gangs, we also tried to not be too stereotypical. You know, we as Spanish developers, we've seen a lot of bullfighters representing Spain, for example, and that's not really our culture. So I think we looked a lot more at, like, the background of the gangs, what music they listen to, and of course that countercultural movement is similar to what you see in a skateboard culture in Western countries, so it kind of makes sense.
"And so starting with that, it was not that hard to actually think about. Okay, so a character that has this background, why did they join this specific gang? You know. working out all that reason. Why are they doing these Denshattack things? Some of them, like for example, the case of the gyaru, it can be more like a solo thing, but for the bōsōzoku, it's more about fighting the system, and and for Suzuna, as the leader of the Voicekeepers (another Denshattack gang with a goth-rock theme), it's more like finding her place in the world, outside the the mainstream."
Protag Emi initially appears as an exception among the main cast, being a ramen delivery girl who gets into Denshattacking because it’s a laugh, only later developing a revolutionary spirit of her own. Still, she’s a cracking main character, as she follows the same arc and feels the same feelings as the player: the thrill of being able to make a train do 720 Impossibles, maturing into a desire to use these stunt powers to mess up some dickheads. She also conveys one of Denshattack’s subtler messages, namely that you don’t need to be a flag-waving militant to help heal the world.
As Jaumandreu says, a "good heart" is enough, at least to start with. "You see from her background that she was raised in a loving family, she cares about people, she cares about people that she just met. And she has that good nature in her character, in her spirit, even if she's being super playful. For example, when she really comes to understand why Yamagata is so angry with the world, because of his background, she empathises a lot and says, well, let’s make a better world. Even if I just want to have fun in it, but you know, there are things that are more important.
Beltran concurs, seeing their lead as embodying Denshattack’s uplifting quality. "For me personally," he says, "one of the powerful things about Emi as a character is that - and I've seen this reaction in players, and it makes me really proud of David and Jordi [de Paco], the other writer - we took a pretty optimistic approach with her. It’s not necessarily that we are particularly optimistic about the future, but I think it's refreshing. I think we gain nothing by being too pessimistic, and I think Emi is a great character because you can see yourself in her. It’s like breaking the fourth wall because you, as a player, are also entering Denshattack because you want to have fun, and then you realise you are caring about these characters and about this world. I think even though you are fighting this super shady corporation, and the game has a lot of similarities to the real world, it still takes a very optimistic approach. I don't know, I'm always in for a bit of optimism these days!"
Catharsis forms another key component of Denshattack’s optimism. For its characters, opportunities to undermine the regime – a smashed CCTV camera here, an induced kaiju attack there – are rarely more than a few track bends away, and us in the real world get to take crashy revenge on the AI infrastructure that’s been economically impoverishing us, enabling lies to us, and risking, if not directly damaging our health. It’s ironic, however, that the means of promoting a brighter real-life future often rely on Denshattack leaning into full fantasy, via its increasingly outrageous setpieces and boss battles.
"When something is climactic, it's cathartic," Beltran argues. "We always thought of that when designing levels from a gameplay perspective. Like, we always try to make each level surprising, and that's why we started with a game about trains doing tricks, which is pretty unique by itself. But for us, that was just the beginning, and that's why we then added things like you riding a Ferris wheel, or entering a volcano, or fighting a mecha. So we tried to sprinkle these very intense moments throughout the game."
"Sometimes you fantasise with it, right?" Jaumandreu adds. "Like the whole 'train doing skating' thing is... well, it's a fantasy of mine because I find it cool. But it's like whenever you go on a train and look through the window, everybody has imagined it’s like you're skating over whatever goes through the window, right? I think those moments were kind of natural to create in the Denshattack setting, so it was a very collaborative moment when everybody in the team kind of entered the flow of Denshattack and the world. Some [setpiece ideas] would come from the writers, some would come from the level designer, some would come from the producer. It was a really collaborative thing."
It is to Denshattack’s credit that it doesn’t merely exploit these fantasies for escapism’s sake; this may be a reality in which the 09:15 to Osaka can leap off its tracks and start grinding a rainbow rail in the sky, but it’s still one based on our own, with many of the same problems. And, while it’s also true that none of these problems can actually be fixed by challenging their perpetrators to a trick battle, there is real sincerity in the game’s belief that effecting change isn’t the sole domain of those with a lifetime of activist bona fides. Anyone can help, and can help with a smile. There’s power in that message, I think, whether or not it's the one Undercoders set out to make.
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