Crazy Taxi

Crazy Taxi is an arcade driving game developed by Hitmaker and published by SEGA, originally released in arcades in 1999 and for the Dreamcast in January 2000 in North America. It is one of the defining games of the Dreamcast library and one of the most recognisable arcade titles of the late 1990s.

Players choose from four drivers and race against a countdown timer to deliver passengers to their destinations as quickly as possible, earning money through speed, near-misses, and spectacular shortcuts. The scoring system rewarded risk and improvisation: threading between traffic, launching off ramps, and cutting across parks and plazas all added to the fare. The tone was set immediately by The Offspring's 'All I Want' and Bad Religion's 'American Jesus' blasting from the start screen, a licensed soundtrack that became inseparable from the game's identity.

The Dreamcast version was developed closely alongside the arcade original and is considered one of the most faithful home ports of the era. It added an original city alongside the arcade map and a set of Crazy Box challenge missions. The game demonstrated the Dreamcast's ability to match arcade hardware at a time when that was still a meaningful selling point for a home console.

Crazy Taxi was ported to PlayStation 2 and GameCube in 2001, though both versions replaced the licensed music and real-world brand names with generic substitutes due to licensing costs, which remains a sore point among fans of the original. PC and mobile versions followed. A remaster with the original soundtrack has never been released officially.

The franchise produced two sequels: Crazy Taxi 2 (2001, Dreamcast) and Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller (2002, Xbox). Crazy Taxi: World Tour (2027), directed by original creator Kenji Kanno, is the first new mainline entry since.