Originally released in the arcades in 1999, Crazy Taxi lured people over by its loud music, wild kinetic gameplay, and bright blue sky visuals. It was popular in the arcades and would find even more success on home consoles (Dreamcast, GameCube, and PlayStation 2). Disregarding ports and a peculiar mobile game, Crazy Taxi: World Tour is the first new entry in the series in over 20 years. I recently attended a small information session with Crazy Taxi series lead producer and director of the original arcade game, Kenji Kanno.

Kanno started off his presentation by talking about the creation of the original Crazy Taxi. He was heavily influenced by movies and TV shows with car chases. He imagined a game “where you would be driving a car and just running wild through the city” and wanted to praise and award players for “driving in a super cool way.” In addition, he told a fun anecdote about how the development team thought centering the game on taxi driving was super lame. He eventually convinced the team that, “as professional game developers making something that is lame or uncool look cool is our job.”

When Kanno first started demoing World Tour, he joked that at first glance the game looks like a 1-to-1 remake of the original. Despite the core gameplay sticking close to its predecessors, this new iteration of Crazy Taxi is promising a modern and full-featured story mode and online multiplayer (something which SEGA originally tried to implement on the original Xbox). It’s worth noting that a classic mode where the player's only goal is to rack up cash by driving passengers to their destinations will also be included.

The eponymous World Tour mode sends original Crazy Taxi driver Axel on a globe trotting quest to find his stolen taxi. His adventure starts off on the West Coast map from the original arcade game featuring a heavy graphics upgrade. Prior job listings at SEGA hint that the game is most likely running on Unreal Engine 5. SEGA hasn’t divulged the other 4 cities you’ll visit (5 in total), but each will be in a different country across the world. I noticed an icon in b-roll footage provided by SEGA that seems to hint that one new city could be in Africa. Driving around Egyptian pyramids sounds pretty fun if you ask me, but expect SEGA to start officially unveiling the other locations at Gamescom later this month.

From what SEGA showed us in a brief hand-off gameplay session, you now have new ways to make cash in World Tour mode. Alongside passengers waiting to be picked up, there’s a number of side missions littered across the map. One example shown involved Axel helping a local pizza guy deliver a towering stack of 40 pizza pies. Cheeseburger, the pizza parlor owner, actually sits in the backseat of the taxi precariously balancing the pies while you drive. Another had Axel racing the pilot Bull (a potential taxi customer from the original Crazy Taxi) in a quick race across town. I’m slightly amused by the return of passengers from the first game, but I do think it helps reinforce SEGA’s desire to maintain the spirit and feel of the arcade original.

SEGA recently announced a closed network test for two of the game’s multiplayer modes. One mode called Pickup Race has you and up to 5 other players race to drop off multiple passengers and earn the most money before time runs out. The other mode called Cops ‘N’ Cabbies has a team of 3 cops & 3 cab drivers competing against one another. The closed network test and Gamescom will be the first opportunities for the general public to play the game. Original Crazy Taxi producer Hisao Oguchi noted in an old Next Generation interview that location testing the arcade game was extremely important in helping determine the final gameplay. He explained, “The driving feel was very cool. It was more ‘cool taxi’ than ‘crazy taxi’. After the location test we concentrated more on the ‘crazy’ aspect of the game.” I’m hoping the upcoming network test gives the development team a lot of great feedback on both fine tuning the multiplayer mode, but especially on making sure the gameplay maintains the proper level of ‘crazy’. Sadly, the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game will not be part of the closed network test.

Shortly after the unveiling of Crazy Taxi: World Tour, people noticed that the game’s Steam page disclosed that the development team is using AI to help create the game. Kotaku directly asked Kanno about the AI usage and he stated, “everything from programming to assets, everything is made by an actual human. It’s only used as a reference for them to look at and then they would actually create the actual thing that would go into the game.” I’m disappointed in SEGA’s decision to use AI in this fashion. One of SEGA’s strongest assets during the Dreamcast days was the amazing artists who brought so much soul into the innovative games of that era. Using AI to generate reference materials, which may include concept art, seems pretty soulless to me.

One of my favorite modes from the Dreamcast Crazy Taxi was the Crazy Box mode where players were challenged to complete a series of sometimes quirky, but also super unique and fun missions. One of my favorites was racing across a giant bowling alley and racing towards multiple sets of bowling pins and driving into them for strikes. The missions in the new World Tour mode sound like they’re following in the spirit of the old Crazy Box missions and make me very hopeful about playability of that mode.

I think Crazy Taxi fans have lots to be excited about. SEGA appears to realize the importance of maintaining the feel of the original game. While I love Crazy Taxi 2 & 3, they deviated from the base gameplay formula by introducing the ability to jump (with the press of a button). World Tour, like the original arcade game, still lets you get air, but it’s only when you jump off a ramp or are flying down a hill. It’s more grounded, but in some ways more thrilling. Gene Hackman didn’t have a jump button in The French Connection. Reviving an old franchise is never easy, but if SEGA stays crazy, they might actually pull it off with Crazy Taxi: World Tour.