Sega unveiled Crazy Taxi: World Tour at the Xbox Showcase yesterday as an all-new installment of the classic driving action series. Original creator Kenji Kanno showed up at the Summer Game Fest to talk about why he’s making the game 27 years after the first game.
Crazy Taxi: World Tour is slated for release in 2027 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Steam, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2.
Watch the announcement trailer here: https://youtu.be/ePi8tDdKuWw
In a press briefing at SGF, Kanno spoke through a translator about how the game will take players on a high-octane adventure to five cities around the globe.
In the new World Tour story-driven campaign, players will play as Axel, chasing down mysterious masked villains who stole his beloved taxi all while tackling extreme missions and challenges. Kanno’s lead designer played the game while Kanno talked about it.
Kanno, who is serving as creative producer, said he couldn’t talk too much about the game’s details as it’s not coming out until 2027; he confirmed it will have multiplayer but he could say much more. You will be able to play against friends or go online with the multiplayer. You can revisit the original games in Arcade Mode, and you can unlock a variety of vehicles and customize your taxi to create your own ride.
Back in the 1990s, racing games were popular, but Kanno said he didn’t find them to be that fun. Yet he was a big fan of movies and loved shows with car chase scenes.
“Everyone would be very excited in the theater. So I thought to myself, ‘Wait, if I make this into a video game, it will be a hit,'” he said.
He wanted to make a game in a city that really felt alive. He showed off his driving skills in the old Dreamcast version of Crazy Taxi. (That game came out in 2000, a year after Crazy Taxi debuted in the arcades.
After the first Dreamcast version, Crazy Taxi 2 came out on the Dreamcast in 2001, followed by Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller on Xbox in 2002, Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride in 2003 on Game Boy Advance, Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars in 2007 for the PlayStation Portable, Crazy Taxi: City Rush on mobile in 2014, and Crazy Taxi Tycoon in 2007 on iOS and Android.
Of the original, Kanno said he wanted to make it feel like you were driving in a city that felt alive with real people, who proceeded to dive out of the way of the taxi to stay alive.
“You can hear people talking, you can hear people calling out to you, and we arrived at the conclusion of having a taxi be the main part of the driving and having it be an open car, like with no roof, a convertible, so you can just hear everyone talking to you as you drive around,” Kanno said.
He wanted people to have positive feelings while playing, and he didn’t want to tell people they ewre playing the game wrong.
“No, I want everyone to be able to play the game how they want to, and would still be praised, would still be told, ‘Hey, you’re cool, you’re wicked, you’re slick,’ while you play the game,” he said.
The games all came with a lot of music, and the song in the trailer for the new game is All I Want from The Offspring. Kanno said that the game is coming now because Sega announced a few years ago that it was going to revive its legacy intellectual properties, and this is one of them. Kanno said fans have been asking for a new one for a while, and he’s happy to oblige.
Back in the 1990s, it wasn’t possible to provide much backstory for the characters or lore. But now it’s possible to have an expansive story mode. The main character here is Axel. His beloved taxi gets stolen and he goes to different locations to try to retrieve it.
“That’s all I can say today. Before the marketing people get angry at me, so, but as soon as I can share more details, I will,” he said.
Kanno showed that you can drive into the ocean in the new game and you can even pick up passengers in the water. You can also drive onto a pier and go fishing, where a passenger stands up in the back seat, casts the line into the water, and you drive forward and back to reel in a fish. You can reel in a big fish or, if you’re lucky, you can reel in a big shark.
“We really wanted the game to be fun for both old and new fans of Crazy Taxi,” Kanno said.
He noted that the dev team is multi-generational, with a lot of young folks in their 20s as well as older members like himself. You can pick up a stack of pizzas to deliver and you have drive in a way so that they don’t fall over. Each of the five locations has their own missions — some standalone, some story-baed.
“With the game being called Crazy Taxi, you gotta have some crazy missions in there as well, and this is one of them,” he said.
There will be a night and day system. You can undertake a variety of side missions like fishing. You can make the car do a “crazy dash” or a “crazy drift,” or give it nitrous boost.
“We want each player to be able to express their own identity and how they want to play the game, so we don’t want to limit them to just one play style,” he said. “We have unique customization.”
Questions and answers
Asked how the devs are using generative AI, Kanno said the team uses it as a “reference.”
“So our artists would like pull up, generate some of their ideas, like they wanted some ideas, and then they would look at that generative image, and then they would draw the actual thing,” he said.
“Everything from programming to assets, everything is made by the actual human, like it’s only used for as a reference for them to look at, and then they would actually create the actual thing that would go into the game,” said Kanno.
I asked why it took a long time to make the game. Kanno said he couldn’t comment on the actual time frame, but he said, “I think relative to like current game development timelines it wasn’t that long, relatively, for us to develop this game.”
Another questioner asked how the team weighs the benefits of using generative AI versus the pushback that a lot of games are getting right now from the public.
He said the extent of the use of generative AI is limited to what he mentioned, where it is used just as a reference.
“Moving forward in the future, it is probably going to be more of a hot topic,” he said. “That’s all I can say right now of how we use generative AI for this game.”