[COLUMN] 25 Years Later, Crazy Taxi Still Rips | by Marty Sliva

“Okay…YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH.”

There are two types of people in the world. Most of you are the first kind, where that opening string of words didn’t make a lick of sense. The second type are immediately hearing the opening seconds of The Offspring’s “All I Want” in their head, a fitting earworm considering this week is the 25th anniversary of Crazy Taxi on the Sega Dreamcast.

Crazy Taxi was developed by Sega’s internal Hitmaker studio, a team that primarily worked on arcade games like Virtual On, Sega Rally, and Virtua Tennis. But their project that stood out to me the most was Crazy Taxi, which released on the Sega Dreamcast 25 years ago this week, after hitting arcades the year prior.

My time with the Dreamcast was as short as it was sweet. I didn’t hop aboard the train when it dropped in the US on the faithful date of 9.9.99, but I saved up money and finally took the plunge six months later. And at the time, for one incredible year, the Dreamcast was probably my favorite video game console ever made. Sonic Adventure, Soulcalibur, Power Stone, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Grandia II, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Skies of Arcadia, and of course Crazy Taxi all made that year one of my absolute favorites in gaming history.

But all that glitters is not gold, and by the time the back half of 2001 rolled around, it was clear that Sega’s time in the console arms race was coming to an end. The Dremcast released in a strange liminal space between console generations. The Nintendo 64 and PS1 were winding down – while we’d still get gems like Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy IX, Silent Hill, Perfect Dark, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, it was clear that a lot of focus had shifted to the impending next generation of hardware. 

But it’d still be another year or two until we saw the PS2, GameCube, and original Xbox. And so Sega took that opportunity to be first to market with a console that genuinely felt like it could replicate the kind of experiences that you could only get at arcades. And unless you were a kid in the ‘90s who spent a ton of time in arcades, it’s hard to describe just how special it felt to be able to have experiences that looked and played like those in home-console form, including Crazy Taxi.

If you haven’t played it, Crazy Taxi is pretty much exactly what its name implies. You pick one of four cab drivers with attitude, are dropped into a colorful facsimile of San Francisco, and you have a limited amount of time to pick up passengers and deliver them to their desired destinations around town. The faster and more stylish you make it there, the more money and extra time you get. You play until your timer hits zero, which generally wasn’t very long in the arcades, but the magic of the Dreamcast meant that you didn’t have to keep pumping in quarters to have fun.

The first thing that stood out to me about the game was its limited but incredible soundtrack featuring tracks from the aforementioned Offspring as well as Bad Religion. This was right at the time when games started heavily featuring licensed music, and as a kid in middle school who was trying to discover the kind of music that resonated with him, this meant everything to me. Crazy Taxi sat alongside games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Jet Set Radio, Aggressive Inline, and Grand Theft Auto 3 as not only fun experiences to play, but entryways into musical worlds that I didn’t know existed.

Once you got past the rad soundtrack, the next thing that immediately stood out was the rampant, but extremely fitting product placement that was spread throughout the game’s city. When a passenger would hop in a car and give you their destination, this would occasionally include places like Pizza Hut, Tower Records, the Levi's store or KFC. At this time, it felt strange seeing these real-world locations in a video game, but given the subject matter, it added a sense of tangibility to the strange take on San Francisco, and I was all there for it.

Crazy Taxi pressed on through sequels on the Dreamcast and original Xbox, mobile and handheld spinoffs, and eventual digital ports to future platforms, though these sadly sometimes excluded the songs and product placement due to licensing issues. It also paved the way for plenty of imitators, most notably 2001’s The Simpsons: Road Rage, which was so blatant in its copying of the Crazy Taxi formula that Sega took Fox, EA, and Radical Entertainment to court, eventually settling in private for an undisclosed amount.

In the modern era, we still see the occasional indie pop up that tries to capture the spirit of the original, not nothing quite manages to hit. Thankfully we have the Crazy Eats mini game in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, which gives us a little taste of the magic with Ichiban across the streets of Honolulu. However, Crazy Taxi is a part of Sega’s plan to revive a ton of their dormant IP, with the upcoming project being referred to as a “large-scale, open-world, massively multiplayer driving game.” Time will tell whether it can recapture the magic of the original, but at least former Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz will be happy.

In celebration of the game’s 25th anniversary, I fired up my extremely legal Sega Dreamcast that internally includes every game released for the console, and settled in for a wonderful 30 minutes of Crazy Taxi joy. The soundtrack still rips, the energy of zipping through the city is still there, and the tension of making drop offs just under the wire is still a ton of fun. It’s clear that there’s something here that could absolutely work in 2025, so I hope Sega manages to tap into that.

But beyond just Crazy Taxi, I was reminded of just how much I loved Sega’s little console that could. Though it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t room for a fourth console alongside the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox, the two years that the Dreamcast ran free were some of my favorites. The games felt like they existed without any creative restrictions. A library that was there for a good time, not necessarily a long one. And sometimes, that’s all I want.