“Let’s go make some keraaaaazy money!”
Yeah, that’s the good stuff.
There might not be a better case for the very existence of video games than “Crazy Taxi.”
It’s not a sentiment I feel needs any hedging. If I were to sit down with a non-gamer and try to explain to them the reason for gaming in the first place, I would probably turn to Crazy Taxi at some point in the discussion, or if my words were failing me at that point, simply point at the game and grunt.
The reasons for this are pretty easily summarized.
- Crazy Taxi is a game that fits the medium of interactive entertainment like a driving glove.* It is an excellent example of what the thing is.
- Crazy Taxi, with almost no investment required by the player whatsoever, provides completely unbridled adrenaline and joy.
* Yes, I have given myself full LICENSE to make as many driving puns/references as I‘d like, and we’re all just going to have to BUCKLE UP and deal with that.
On that first point, driving games are significantly responsive to what the player does. They are immersive and immediate about feedback. Hit the gas: surge forward. Turn left: go around the corner. Turn too far left: go off a cliff. All of this is really easy to understand and relate to.
But circling back to point two, more so than perhaps any other genre in video gaming, the mere notion of enjoyment is really friggin’ important in racing games.
That might sound kind of ridiculous on the face of it – I mean, we play games for enjoyment, yes? Shouldn’t that be the key consideration when evaluating any game?
But looking at something like another recent entry in this countdown “Resident Evil 2,” the desired reaction in the gamer in that game isn’t simply pure mirth. That game wants to frighten, to scare, to thrill. Yes, please have a good time. But do it in a specific way (by shitting your pants).
Go down the list. “Final Fantasy Tactics” wants you to engage your brain. “Tempest 2000” wants you to go into a trance-like state. “Dance Dance Revolution” wants you to jump around like a lunatic. And so on, and so on.
Crazy Taxi, on the other hand, would make Cyndi Lauper proud: It just wants you to have fun.
The game shares its devotion to freedom and joy with the arcade racing classics of yesteryear like “Pole Position” or “Out Run,” offering an opportunity to let your hair blow in the (imaginary) wind and simply bask in life for a bit while broadsiding a bus with your bright yellow tool of destruction.
And it works. A game being a proxy for real life is seldom so enjoyable an experience as through a properly conceived racer. The adrenaline is part of it, and certainly with newer games and simulations in the genre, the necessary precision (and thus perfectionism of the driver) is key too. Yet, the main goal is more generalized: about finding a relatable sense of escape.
In this countdown, the most direct comparison available to us for proving the point is the similarily cartoonish “Super Mario Kart.”
The original Mario Kart, in addition to being joyful, had the distinction of creating a whole sub-genre as it kick-started the “kart racer.” And in similar fashion, Crazy Taxi was an innovator by not being a traditional racing game either.
Both games are obsessed with creating a busy, colorful world to traverse, of providing a sharp deadline to navigate, and in allowing for the player’s devilish side to flex a little.
But here’s the primary difference: Crazy Taxi goes about these things in an even more open way than Mario Kart does.
Mario Kart is limiting by sticking to a traditional race course approach. Yes, you can go off-roading and find the occasional shortcut. But you can go the wrong direction. And you can get your racing wrong by losing to the other racers.
You can be wrong.
The true genius of Crazy Taxi is that there’s no wrong way to play.
If you have no idea what you’re doing … there is chaotic, mirthful mayhem.
If you’ve mastered the more advanced techniques and memorized the maps and know where everything is … there is chaotic, mirthful mayhem.
In sum, the notions of “success” or “winning” are basically nullified. This game rewards good and bad players alike.
Crazy Taxi is for everyone.
Crazy Taxi at a glance:
Genre: Racer
Released: 2000
Platform: Dreamcast
GamesRadar’s No. 3 Sega Dreamcast Game of All Time
In the game, you take on the role of a taxi driver charged with driving people around a San Francisco-inspired cityscape. You can customize your driver among a few options, but the shared characteristic they all have is an aura of unreliability.
This is prophetic.
The basic point of the game is to get your cab fare to their destination as quickly as possible. Successful delivery extends the time you can continue playing, meaning you get to string more and more cab rides together the faster you are.
Of course, this often goes catastrophically wrong, resulting in much hilarity.
The additional “crazy” parts of this (beyond your unreliable-looking avatar) are a cityscape that is sorta unhinged — with an equally unhinged collection of potential fares, who are all eager to chirp nonsense at you from the backseat — coupled with a taxi capable of performing death-defying stunts. There are also no rules beyond, “get them there quickly.” If that involves accidentally doing a donut or flipping your car across a catastrophic-looking pit of doom, so be it.
Certain elements are predictable, like the various paths available to take on your journey. You know “X” bridge connects with “Y” road that leads to “Z” tunnel, and so forth.
Other factors are harder to account for … like traffic patterns or even the behavior of individual drivers, who might veer toward or away from you without a whole lot of warning either way.
Thus, we have the following equation:
Wacky environment + stunt-capable car + running timer = launching your taxi toward the moon like you’re a character in the “Dukes of Hazzard.”
This game represented a fun evolution for Sega, a company that had of course made waves on the home market in the late 80s and early 90s by directly challenging Nintendo with its 16-bit Genesis, but which had also established itself as a producer of really excellent arcade racers. That list included standouts like “OutRun,” “Hang-On,” “Virtua Racing,” and “Daytona USA” (among others).
Originally developed for arcades near the turn of the century by a Sega subsidiary (AM3/Hitmaker) and distributed by Sega itself, Crazy Taxi differed by offering a more open environment to race through. Instead of a linear, narrow path to get from Point A to Point B, you could take any route you wanted.
The game’s quality and appeal showed through and Sega wisely realized it would make an excellent experience on its new home console as well. It was one of the first early “big” games on the Dreamcast and became synonymous with a gaming system which deserves a few paragraphs of diversion itself.
Famously, the Dreamcast was Sega’s final console, and it had the plug pulled in fairly sudden and dramatic fashion in the spring of 2001 … meaning it had a run of just over a year and a half in North America.
That is INSANE, my friends. The thing was selling pretty well and had a really interesting lineup of games on it, so people have (justifiably, I think) had trouble letting go. To this day, it remains one of the most beloved gaming systems in the history of the industry.
Why did it fail? Well, the behemoth PlayStation 2 sucked up a lot of the oxygen in the room, and that certainly didn’t help. People have also pointed to Sega’s reputation as having taken a hit over previous generations, but I’m not sure that really gets at the heart of it.
My theory is that Sega flooded the market compared to its competitors, making it much more difficult for consumers to try to keep up, whether the product was quality or not (usually it was).
Looking at the North American release dates of Sega hardware, I think it begins to become pretty clear quickly that only certain folks with time AND money would be able to keep up with all of it. Check this list out:
Master System – 1986
Genesis – 1989
Game Gear – 1991
Sega CD – 1992
Pico – 1994
32X – 1994
Saturn – 1995
Dreamcast – 1999
I’ll give them a little credit for slowing down after the Saturn, but the average lifespan of these systems wasn’t all that long in the grand scheme of things. Compare that to the same time period for Sony:
PlayStation – 1995
PlayStation 2 – 2000
Look, I don’t know what the ideal EXACT lifespan for a gaming console should be. But I do think asking consumers to shell out for the latest new thing at a pace faster than every other year – closer to annually, actually – is fairly unreasonable.
Anyway, by the time 1999 rolled around, even having the likes of genuinely awesome games like Crazy Taxi on their platform apparently couldn’t help Sega keep the lights on, so the Dreamcast was murdered in the middle of the night and a generation of gamers wept.
I wasn’t actually one of them.
I mean, in retrospect, I can look at the situation and sympathize. I think it sucked for a lot of people. But I’d be lying if I said I was broken up at the time. Buying a Dreamcast was a non-starter for me, partly because I was deeply entrenched in Sony’s shenanigans and still keeping a watchful (lustful) eye on what Nintendo was up to in the corner.
But more to the point, I was one of those people who looked at Sega’s track record of shooting a gaming system out their birthing canal every two years and assumed the thing wouldn’t be long for this world (correctly as it turned out).
Yet, a handful of titles were intriguing, and Crazy Taxi was one of them. And Sega knew it. They knew they had something on their hands, so this was one of the early Dreamcast “exclusives” that was quickly earmarked for porting to other systems like the PS2 and GameCube once the Dreamcast was dead and buried.
I somehow still didn’t play Crazy Taxi until a number of years later, but I could recognize that it was undeniably popular and clearly offered a blueprint of sorts for mission-based “open world” affairs like “Grand Theft Auto III.”
As the gamer, you got your “mission” to go to a particular place, but then you got to determine the best route, how to drive to get there, and even if you wanted to ignore the fare altogether and just go do something else.
Running over pedestrians was just a bonus.
Now, driving like crack-infused lunatics probably makes more sense for criminals than taxi drivers, and that’s where you give GTA some credit for becoming such a good fit for this particular brand of nonsense. Though that also really does explain why your drivers in Crazy Taxi are a little on the dodgy side.
Sega exec: “Here’s how we make this thing make sense… give that guy green hair!”
Sega exec 2: “Perfect!”
The music was a mix of high-energy punk and rock, featuring tracks from the likes of The Offspring and Bad Religion to keep the pulse up and the foot on the accelerator. Later versions of the game excised these tracks due to licensing challenges. Similarly, the original game had customers taking rides to Pizza Hut and KFC and that got replaced too.
Spiritually, the modern version of the game, even with those cuts, still pretty much hits the mark. I think the San Francisco inspiration is pretty dang important in making that the case. Launching your car through the air is much easier if you’re flinging it up a ramp and then down the side of a mountain, if we’re being honest with ourselves.
Few other cities provide as distinctive a vibe. There’s a real sense of place here, which makes the thing approachable. That can be an important consideration.
The setting is a BIG part of the fun here, and it’s preserved, other weird changes be damned.
So what makes it worth playing today?
Reminiscent of more modern ridiculous games like “Power Wash Simulator” that take mundane tasks and make them enjoyable in a digital environment, Crazy Taxi really was one of the first “simulation” games that centered itself around a concept that doesn’t sound super amazing at first listen, but then becomes instantly appealing the second you turn it on.
“3D sandbox” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot which has an amorphous definition that varies from person to person. Personally, I’d throw Crazy Taxi in the pile of games that fit that description, because even though you’re basically just a driver and that’s it, you have a well-realized environment to play in, and the freedom to explore it to your heart’s content.
I mean, you can drive your convertible with the top down UNDERWATER for long stretches. Clearly, the developers weren’t trying to limit you here.
It’s a great example of the kind of thing GTA would riff off and sell millions of games with later. In that context, it’s an influential game, worthy of a spin.
Beyond that, let’s recount some of the ways this game rules.
- It’s fun as balls.
- You get to experience Sega at the top of its game, specifically as a racing developer/distributor.
- It’s a cool time capsule game thanks to all the punk rock and late 90s touches.
- Crazy Taxi is representative of the Dreamcast, a machine that was genuinely cool and unique and mattered to a lot of people.
- Did I mention it’s fun as balls?
Crazy Taxi is another easy recommendation for this list. Everyone should give it a spin.
As the Offspring would say, let’s “Change the World.”
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware and early ports (Dreamcast, Arcade, PlayStation 2, GameCube, PC)
- That’s basically it since it’s been de-listed on modern platforms like Steam, Apple, and Android.
- Bring it back!