A reboot of the classic arcade game, Sega’s Crazy Taxi will be an online MMO with players driving pursuit vehicles as well as private hire cars.
Released in 1999, Crazy Taxi’s concept was so simple, just about anyone capable of operating a steering wheel could grasp it: pick up customers in your yellow convertible and deliver them to their destination before the time runs out.
A hit arcade game that spawned two sequels and several spin-offs, Crazy Taxi’s name gradually dwindled as Sega struggled to adjust to a changing industry in the 2000s. More recent years, however, have seen Sega begin to revisit some of its past successes, and that’s where the reboot of Crazy Taxi comes in.
Using Unreal Engine, the new Crazy Taxi will attempt to graft the arcade action of the original games with the features you’d expect to see in a modern-day MMO. In other words, it’ll be an online racing game in which players will hurtle around an open-world city in a range of exotic-looking private hire cars.
A new video released by Sega (via Eurogamer) gives a taste of the company’s ambitions: looking at the snippets of in-game footage, it looks as though players will compete to pick up customers in time-honoured fashion, but there’s also a new twist. Players will also have the option to take the wheel of a police car and pursue those reckless taxi drivers careening all over the place.
Have a gander:
Crazy Taxi is one of five retro revivals announced by Sega last year. The other titles getting a modern lick of paint are Shinobi, a new take on the side-scrolling ninja game; new versions of the belt-scrolling brawlers Golden Axe and Streets Of Rage, now with added 3D; and a shiny reworking of the 2000 skating action game, Jet Set Radio.
Sega seems to have been reinvigorated somewhat in recent years, not least thanks to the box office success of 2020’s Sonic The Hedgehog movie. Popular enough to spawn two sequels (Sonic The Hedgehog 3 is out in December) and a spin-off TV series (Knuckles debuted on Paramount+ in April), Sonic has prompted Sega to look again at its sizeable back catalogue. As a result, the company’s currently working on an animated TV series based on Golden Axe, while a movie adaptation of Streets Of Rage was announced in 2022.
That’s a lot of Sega stuff in the works. If the firm’s run of success continues, perhaps it’ll have the spare cash to think about rejoining the console market. There’s probably a sizeable group of people who’d like to play that upcoming Crazy Taxi on a Sega Dreamcast 2…
Read more: 8 classic Sega games we’d like to see turned into movies