Tech
The Crazy Taxi Remake Revives the Dreamcast Era’s Zany Energy
The Dreamcast era of games was a fever dream of wild, original ideas — Space Channel 5, Seaman, Shenmue, Chu Chu Rocket, Power Stone, Jet Set Radio and more — and perhaps nothing exemplified it better than Crazy Taxi, a game with its pitch in the name. Now, Sega is bringing its zany taxi driving classic back for modern consoles with Crazy Taxi: World Tour — and I got my hands on it for a short preview.
At a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Sega lined up a half-dozen games for its summer press showcase, but my retro gaming heart was fixed on Crazy Taxi. Our current string of remasters is bringing some iconic games to modern audiences, but some, like Silent Hill 2 Remastered and Metal Gear Solid Delta, are based on games so canonized that the revivals aren’t surprising. Crazy Taxi wasn’t a milestone in gaming, but it’s a standout representation of the kinetic energy found in the best of Dreamcast’s game catalog, and I’m delighted to see it brought back.
Mind you, I only got about an hour with the new Crazy Taxi, which is due out in 2027, but I appreciated seeing what Sega kept from the original game — mostly vibes and its vibrant visual style, along with its signature fare-pickup system. You still drive up to a colorful circle representing a person in dire need of a quick ride and slam the accelerator to get them to their destination, haplessly crashing through cars and around pedestrians as the timer counts down. And yes, that sweet late ’90s-to-early 2000s alt rock and pop punk soundtrack is back — just take a listen to Sega’s latest trailer.
Unlike the original, there’s more to the game than just picking up fares until your time runs out. There are several modes in Crazy Taxi: World Tour, and the one I played was more of a free-form sandbox that let players drive around. The preview only had the map for Germany, one of many international locations in the final game, which was a large loop broken up by smaller zones — an airport, a city downtown, a small village and a castle on a hill.
It was in these German-themed pockets that I found my favorite feature of World Tour — specialized fares with their own mini-quests to complete. There were about 10 scattered around the map, and they were all some variation of insane. One was an unsettlingly enthusiastic man in an Easter Bunny costume asking me to help “collect his eggs,” another a daredevil in a wingsuit who wanted to be launched off a cliff from my cab’s backseat. Their dialogue suggested that I’d likely run into these bizarre specimens in other maps and had similarly assisted their bizarre life goals.
This, this, is the Sega Dreamcast energy — the juxtaposition of exaggerated life with funky characters who took it to the next level. After every exhaustingly serious samurai game about regaining honor, beyond each deep RPG with a desperate quest to save the planet, I yearn for a game where I can enter the most lighthearted, dumb-in-the-best-way world of escalating inanity.
Sure, I can find some of that wackiness in emergent gameplay with my friends during a Big Walk or Peak or other modern party games. But I want the delight of a scripted weirdo, someone the game developers unearthed from a twisted corner of their brain that makes me laugh. Unsurprisingly, I often find this in Sega studio RGG’s Yakuza games. But in what I’ve seen, Crazy Taxi: World Tour brings back a bit of that classic, no-explanation-necessary oddball style I remember from booting up the latest Dreamcast game at the turn of the millennium.
As I found in my World Tour preview, where else could I pick up a sleazeball Lothario trying to escape his latest failed amorous encounter, dodging the missiles fired from pursuing cop cars, so I can drop my fare off literally on the wheels of a plane taking off? Keep the fares coming — the crazier, the better.
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