‘Crazy Taxi’ Developer Gives A Big Update On ‘Completely New’ Game

The series producer of Crazy Taxi, Kenji Kanno, has given an update on the new entry, stating that the new game will be “completely new” from what came before. Crazy Taxi is a classic Sega franchise from the days of the Dreamcast. The series has been long dormant, but at the Game Awards last December, Sega announced that Crazy Taxi is making its return.

Like many Sega games, Crazy Taxi started as an arcade title before being ported to home consoles in 2000. The arcade game came out in 1999 and was released on the Dreamcast in 2000. Players take control of one of several taxi drivers, looking for fares and taking their passengers to their destinations as fast as possible to achieve the best score possible. By performing tricks on the way to their destination, players earn better tips, which make for a better score. There have been three mainline Crazy Taxi games, two handheld spinoffs, and two phone games, the last of which was a top-down business manager game released in 2017. The last mainline entry was Crazy Taxi 3 in 2002, and the series has been mostly dormant since.

In a recent interview posted by Sega Japan, Kenji Kanno gave insight into what the revival of Crazy Taxi would be like. The new Crazy Taxi title will focus on multiplayer, with many individuals playing at once. In previous titles, the game was focused on individual gameplay, with each player trying to achieve the best score possible. What a multiplayer-focused Crazy Taxi will be like is unknown, but a recent Sega recruitment page shines some light on this.

Crazy Taxi Goes Open World

Sega posted a recruitment page for the upcoming Crazy Taxi game, highlighting its features. The page calls for people with experience in large-scale levels and multiplayer connectivity. Based on this, Sega appears to be developing an open-world, massively multiplayer Crazy Taxi game.

In addition to Crazy Taxi, Sega is bringing back some of its other classic series. At the same time, Sega announced Crazy Taxi‘s return, it also announced the return of Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage. Sega has not released more information on these revivals so far, but the intention is to bring these series up to triple-A standards.