Crazy Taxi started with a traffic jam. “The inspiration behind Crazy Taxi came to me when I was stuck in traffic one day,” its director, Kenji Kanno, told Retro Gamer. “I noticed a quiet lane on the opposite side of the road and thought how cool it would be to drive onto it and fly down the road.” The game his team at Sega’s AM3 studio built from that idea, for the NAOMI arcade board, handed the player a yellow cab, a sunlit city of steep hills and a clock that never stopped. Passengers paid for speed, and they tipped for driving that would get a real cabbie arrested.
Fast facts
- Developer: Sega AM3, renamed Hitmaker in 2000.
- Producer: Hisao Oguchi. Director: Kenji Kanno.
- Arcade: 1999, on Sega’s NAOMI board.
- Home: Dreamcast, early 2000; PlayStation 2 (Acclaim), 2001; later GameCube, PC, Game Boy Advance, PSP and download versions.
- Drivers: Axel, B.D. Joe, Gena and Gus.
- Music: The Offspring and Bad Religion.
Cool taxi, crazy taxi
Edge previewed the game in April 1999, after it had appeared at Japan’s AOU arcade show. Kanno said the team had been “influenced by car chases in old US TV series”, and he set it against AM1’s free-roaming motorbike game Harley-Davidson & L.A. Riders, where the ride was “relaxing and enjoyable”. “With this game we wanted something different — we wanted panic.”
The panic came late. “Until the location test, we just developed the game system,” Oguchi explained. “The taxi simply picked up passengers… it was more ‘cool taxi’ than ‘crazy taxi’. After the location test, we concentrated more on the ‘crazy’ aspect.” The city was based on San Francisco, which gave it hills, tram lines and sunshine; New York, famous for its yellow cabs, was ruled out because, Oguchi said, “New York is very dark.” He also overruled the standard white NAOMI cabinet: “we asked for a cabinet which allowed players to stand, and for yellow paint instead of white — we wanted a yellow cabinet!”
Kanno told Retro Gamer in 2007 that not everyone had liked the idea. “It was very difficult for us to draw a consensus on making a game out of the ‘taxi’ theme. Some of the team were worried that the concept wouldn’t be cool enough.” A team of 12 worked on it for 18 months. He wanted the weather “extremely bright” to suit the game’s mood, and he put real shops and restaurants into the city because the team “really wanted to make the player feel like they were driving in a real world”.
Playing for tips
Each fare stands on the pavement under a coloured marker: red for a short trip, green for a long one, with orange and yellow between. The player has a separate countdown for every passenger, and a big green arrow points the way. There is no fixed route, so the shortest line runs through parks, down stairs and off car-park roofs. Sega’s American press release listed the tricks that earn tips: the Crazy Jump off ramps, the Crazy Drift round corners, the Crazy Through past other cars at a whisker’s distance, and the Crazy Dash, a sudden burst forward. Under the arcade rules, fast deliveries add time to the main clock, so a skilled driver can keep going. Retro Gamer reckoned one credit could last “almost an hour” for someone who knew the routes.
The destinations included real chains. Sega’s release named Pizza Hut, KFC and Levi Strauss; Retro Gamer added Tower Records and the Fila store.
Kanno picked the music. “We use Offspring and Bad Religion for the background music in the game,” he told Edge, as if it had been a group decision. “It is his personal taste,” a colleague laughed. He later described going “from shop to shop listening to as many demos as possible”, and said the team listened to the songs while they finished the game.
The Dreamcast version
NAOMI was built on the same design as the Dreamcast, and Oguchi told Edge in 1999 that a straight conversion would take about two months. AM3 did more than that. The Dreamcast version added a second, larger city and a mode called Crazy Box, a grid of 16 short challenges that teach the stunts. Kanno said he wanted “some tutorial content… but not be pushy with it”, and his own favourite was Crazy Zig-Zag 2, because it made players “feel like, ‘Wow, I’m a genius!’” Players could also choose fixed three-, five- or ten-minute shifts.
It came out in Japan in January 2000 and in America on 2 February 2000 at $49.95, according to Sega’s press release, two months earlier than first planned. In Britain Edge reviewed it at £40 in March 2000 and gave it seven out of ten. It found the conversion of “stellar quality” but thought that even with the new city and the mini-games it could not deliver “depth on a significant scale”, and was “suited to casual play rather than concerted, weeks-on-end entertainment”. When Acclaim took the game to the PlayStation 2 in 2001, its press release said the Dreamcast version had sold more than $30 million.
Sequels and later versions
AM3 became Hitmaker in 2000. Crazy Taxi 2 (2001) moved to a New York-style city and added a jump button, and Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller came out on the Xbox in 2002. The Hitmaker entry tells that part of the story.
The first game kept moving. Acclaim’s PlayStation 2 version, optimised by Acclaim Studios Cheltenham, came out in 2001; Edge gave it seven out of ten but thought that, with a Dreamcast sequel already due, it arrived not with a bang but as “whimpered genius”. A Game Boy Advance version, Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride, followed in 2003 and got two out of ten from Edge, which found it squeezed in “at the expense of the smooth ride that made the console versions so appealing”. Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars put the first two games on the PSP in 2007, and a download version reached the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2010. Later versions dropped the real brands: by 2007 Retro Gamer noted that instead of KFC, players drove to “FCS (Fried Chicken Shack)”.
Sources
- Edge issue 70, April 1999, p. 32: Crazy Taxi preview (AM3; Hisao Oguchi and Kenji Kanno; the TV car chases; Harley-Davidson & L.A. Riders; “we wanted panic”; the location test; San Francisco and New York; the yellow cabinet; The Offspring and Bad Religion; the two-month conversion).
- Edge issue 78, November 1999: Crazy Taxi for Dreamcast, “one of the first arcade machines to use the Naomi board”. Issue 81, February 2000: preview (the extra city, 16 mini-games).
- Edge issue 82, March 2000, p. 70: Dreamcast review (£40; seven out of ten).
- Edge issue 98, June 2001, p. 80: PlayStation 2 review (Hitmaker/Acclaim; seven out of ten).
- Edge issue 125, July 2003: Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride review (two out of ten).
- Edge issue 220, November 2010: the Xbox Live Arcade release.
- Stuart Hunt, “The Making of: Crazy Taxi”, Retro Gamer issue 42 (2007), pp. 70–73: Kanno’s interview (the traffic jam, the team’s doubts, 12 people and 18 months, the weather, the brands, the music, Crazy Box and Crazy Zig-Zag 2); an hour on one credit; the fare colours; Fare Wars and the replaced brands.
- Sega of America press releases, 9 December 1999 and 2 February 2000 (archived by Sega Retro): the drivers, the release date and price, the stunts, Arcade, Original and Crazy Box modes, the brands. https://segaretro.org/Crazy_Taxi
- Acclaim Entertainment press release, 6 April 2001 (Business Wire): PlayStation 2 rights, more than $30 million of Dreamcast sales, Acclaim Studios Cheltenham.
- Sega Retro, “Crazy Taxi” (web, secondary): release dates by region; the Crazy Box grid of 16 challenges; the GameCube, PC, PSP and download versions; the brands replaced from the PC version onwards. https://segaretro.org/Crazy_Taxi