A Japanese-language video has revealed what SEGA may have in store for the now iconic Crazy Taxi, which burst onto the scene during the Dreamcast era.
A reboot of the IP is in the works, produced by SEGA’s Sapporo Studio. The Japanese company established the studio in December 2021 and is working on several games as a support team. Kenji Kanno, director of the original Crazy Taxi, talked about the project with some of his colleagues in the video embedded below. According to the video, the developers are currently testing how to translate the franchise’s gameplay (getting passengers to their destinations as quickly as possible) into a multiplayer game world.
The Crazy Taxi reboot will take place in a large, realistic city modeled after the West Coast of the United States. It features an amusement park-like map, according to the video. There are several posts revealing more details about the project. It is described as a large online game with an open world and “massively multiplayer driving game” elements. So it could be an MMO (massively multiplayer online), just not an RPG (like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV). The job postings also tell us that SEGA Sapporo Studio is developing the game on the Unreal Engine, so it can be said that the technology the developers are using is Unreal Engine 5.
In December, during The Game Awards, SEGA announced that Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Shinobi and Crazy Taxi would be revived in some form. Crazy Taxi debuted in arcades in 1999 and was popularized by SEGA’s Dreamcast port a year later (it became the platform’s third best-selling game in the US). It spawned two sequels and several spin-offs. The latest installment is the Xbox exclusive Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller.
Soon we’ll be able to turn on the taxi meter…
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