A wild driving game from Sega for their Naomi coin-op and Dreamcast console.

In Crazy Taxi you are a cabbie in a sunny beachside city with striking similarities to San Francisco.

You pick up passengers, who expect to be dropped off at another location within a time limit. Drop them off quickly and you are rewarded with extra game time.

Customers tip heavily for dangerous driving -- but only when it pays off and you don't collide. You get tips for:

String together a load of Crazy moves in succession, and watch those tips go sky high.

Crazy Taxi is a return to hi-score centric gaming -- it's all about beating your hi score, and that of your friends. For some reason, the hi score has lost favour in recent years, although in the golden age of videogames (Asteroids, Pac Man, Frogger), the hi score was king.

I certainly enjoy the art of making crazy money! Even though I'm not very good at it here's a shopping list of things I truly love about this game.


This is some wonderful insanity as far as video games go. It's one of those great old games everybody has a story about.

Crazy Taxi Technique

This is how you perform the essential maneuvers apart from steering, in order to enjoy the game:
(F means Forward on the gear shifter, and R consequently Reverse)

  • Crazy Drift: (Power slide) R then F and then turn the wheel hard.
  • Crazy Dash: (Speed increase) With both pedals released, hold F and floor gas pedal. Release shifter.
  • Limit Cut: (Increase speed above maximum!) Release gas pedal. R then F, floor gas pedal after 1/3 sec. Requires extreme timing.
There are more, but learn these first.

These are the drivers you can choose from:

  • Axel, good allround driver.
  • B.D. Joe, very fast car with really bad traction.
  • Gena, Top acceleration and brakes but slow and light.
  • Gus Good traction on this heavy car, although acceleration sucks.

One thing that no one has mentioned about the game yet is the subtle racism that is all over the game. All of the black people in the game are very stereotypical. Speaking mostly in Ebonics. B.D. Joe is the prime example here. But it is also evident in the customers too. It is hard not to notice that the two most common destinations for the black customers are FILA and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I am not sure if this was intentional on the programmers behalf, (or if it was just case of the Japanese programmers copying what they had seen in American pop culture).

Now on a different note. The Crazy Taxi engine was full of bugs, and suffered from massive clipping problems. The vehicle physics were less than accurate, and it was quite easy to make the cars do truly strange things (you can even get them stuck partially inside objects, or make them move along a wall on two wheels at about one mile an hour (leaning the wrong way I might add).

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