Remembering the Sega Dreamcast

Crazy Taxi

Publisher: Sega
Year: 2000

Ah, Crazy Taxi – arguably one of the finest, most frantic of driving experiences, and still capable of putting Burnout to shame on many levels. Crazy Taxi really was one of the most fun racing games of it’s time.

Well, to call it a ‘racing’ game is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, as the emphasis here isn’t on completing laps or fine-tuning of your car at all. Instead, the Dreamcast version of Crazy Taxi is a slightly updated version of the same arcade game that Sega also published in the late 1990s.

Rather than circuit racing, the aim of the game is - you guessed it - to taxi passengers around an impressively large city as fast as you possibly can. That’s where the ‘Taxi’ bit comes from, see?


The ‘Crazy’ bit comes from the gleeful destruction you can wreak along the way, launching yourself off as many ramps as you can, and weaving through oncoming traffic to excite your passengers/victims and get an extra buck or two of tip/ransom. Every stunt you successfully pull off nets you a ‘Crazy Through’ bonus too.

The main focus of the game isn’t on the stunts, but the speed – even by today's high-poly standards Crazy Taxi is a break-neck ride, and the city the game takes place in is impressively detailed. Best of all, the game requires no loading interruptions as you make your way to the next destination or passenger before the time runs out. The view distance is a bit short admittedly, and the horizon usually fades off into an unimaginative white, but for the time, the graphics are fantastic and they’re still very tolerable today.

One of the best things about Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast isn’t the fidelity of the graphics, but the soundtrack. Encompassing all the best rock and punk of the time, The Offspring and Bad Religion feature heavily on the tracklist, and you wouldn’t believe how quickly or brightly our faces lit up when we booted up our copy of the game and were greeted to the opening riffs of The Offspring’s All I Want.


Like all of the best games Crazy Taxi has it’s fair share of controversy too, namely because of the in-game advertising that features so heavily - passengers often ask for you to take them to KFC or Pizza Hut. All these are modelled as in-game locations, though our own view is that they fit into the game too well to be a real issue.

Undoubtedly one of the smoothest and fastest games on the Dreamcast. Crazy Taxi is still incredibly fun and very playable today. The textures are a little bland and the difficulty is unforgiving, but this is a game about speed and very little else. Replayability and lengthy campaigns – these things don’t matter, and that’s even hammered home by the available game modes, which cater specifically to three, five and ten minute bursts.

Of course, if you’re looking for something a little more goal-orientated then you can always try out the Crazy Box mode, which was first added for the Dreamcast version of the game and introduces some simple mini-games. Don’t expect it to hold your interest for too long though – the score-attack mode is very much the core of the game. We thought Crazy Taxi was the most awesome thing on the planet when it was first released in 2000, and that opinion is still mostly unaltered today.