At last year’s Game Awards, Sega pulled a crazy move and announced not one, but half a dozen revivals of beloved series that have been dormant for a long time. Chief among them was a new Crazy Taxi game, and we’ve finally gotten the first details about it, namely that it’ll be a large scale multiplayer game in a vast open world, which I don’t believe anybody really asked for.
According to Automaton, which translated a video interview with the developers and first reported the details, Sega has some ambitious plans for the revival of its beloved series, but they seem a little preliminary. The developers that appear on camera seem to suggest that,though they’re currently planning for the new Crazy Taxi to be a massively multiplayer game, the team currently lacks programmers with the skills to build the infrastructure. Development on the new Crazy Taxi game seems early days, and as such, the interview partially functions as a call for more developers to join Sega and help make the title. As spotted by Automaton, the Crazy Taxi recruitment page has several listings calling the game a “large-scale online title.”
The team featured in the interview also use language that seems to suggest that plans could change if they don’t work out, but that this is the current direction for the Crazy Taxi revival. The game is currently being developed in Unreal Engine 4 and, as such, will feature a realistic city as one of its maps, as well as a theme park. The goal seems to be to amplify the realism of the environments on this new engine in order to increase the sense of chaos as players barrel through places that are deeply familiar to them.
Crazy Taxi, as folks might remember, has largely been a single-player series with a focus on style (and branding) over realism, which makes some of these statements just a wee bit strange. First arriving in arcades, where it remains pretty popular to this day, Crazy Taxi was eventually released to consoles, but even then, its multiplayer was fairly limited in its later entries, and its visual identity has always remained fairly intact. Sega’s current revival of the series seems to throw many of these tenets out in order to reinterpret them for a modern audience, and I wish em’ the best of luck with that Herculean task.
Which isn’t to say I’m not on board with some of the stuff that Sega is saying, but merely suggesting that for diehard fans that really wanted the Crazy Taxi series to come back, something this new and distinct will feel heretical. I think most folks probably wanted a version of the game that lives up to their childhood memories of it. Then again, I do know that people, like myself, have enjoyed the variant of Crazy Taxi that exists as a minigame in Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, so maybe this is exactly what the series needs.
I’m definitely down for making Crazy Taxi a massively multiplayer game, which could live up to the “crazy” in the series’ moniker. Trying to imagine a dozen or so taxis manically faring people up and down a realistic San Francisco brings a faint smile to my face, and if it’s well done, Sega could actually be onto something here. It seems like we won’t see the fruit of Sega’s labor for a while still as it figures out how viable a massively multiplayer Crazy Taxi is, but when we do, I hope it looks and sounds like a hundred taxis blaring The Offspring as loud as possible.
