Crazy Taxi – Arcade

Crazy Taxi is a score attack game where the player controls 1 of 4 taxi drivers looking for fares, as you take them to their destination as fast as possible while you race against a countdown timer. The game ends when the clock runs out. Each passenger adds time to the clock and you obtain bonus time based on how fast you get to the destination.

What makes this game fun is the classic score chase that hearkens back to the best arcade titles of the 80s.  Keep playing to get better and better as you learn routes and master techniques to shave a few seconds off your time. There are no continues, so you only get one shot to do it right with each run.

That would be enough for a killer title but, as always, SEGA kicks it up a notch.  The soundtrack, comprised of The Offspring and Bad Religion, gets you amped as hell while you play.  Couple that with cutting edge graphics that still hold up today and sprinkle in tight controls… you have a recipe for an instant classic.

As well as arcades, this game came to consoles on the home version of the NAOMI board, known as the SEGA Dreamcast.  Since the Dreamcast was the same board with less RAM, almost every title was an arcade perfect home version, similar to the Neo Geo.  Though I have never verified, I have heard you can run the Dreamcast GD ROM version in an arcade machine and vice versa.

Outside of SEGA consoles, this game saw port after port, even getting a Game Boy Advance version.  It spawned 2 sequels that also hit many of the big consoles of the day.

SEGA is even releasing a new Crazy Taxi game.  As of this writing at the end of 2025, we should see a 4th entry to this amazing franchise sometime in 2026.