In December of last year, Sega announced plans to bring back a plethora of classic IP, including the beloved Crazy Taxi which saw players skidding around a city as they delivered customers to their destinations.
The game is still in its early development phases, but thanks to a new video and job listings we can glean a few snippets of information.
Sega is currently looking to fill several positions for the new Crazy Taxi title. Most of the ten listings describes the game as a ” new major online title (large-scale project, open world, mass multiplayer driving game) .
They also specify that it will run on the “latest Unreal Engine” and that is is aiming to “become a global hit, primarily in the North American market.”
Sega also published a video aimed to attracting talent to work on the game. Of course, it’s in Japanese, a language I don’t speak, so everything I gleaned from it came from the footage shown, translations offered by other people and Youtube’s own inbuilt translation system.
The general gist is that the team are indeed testing Crazy Taxi as a more multiplayer focused project, but its unclear whether that extends to it being a live-service or whether it will have any form of singleplayer. The level design team discusses trying to give the city a “realistic” feeling while also giving it a “theme park-like atmosphere.”
Ultimately, the video does emphasis that the team is only testing ideas right now, meaning that this multiplayer Crazy Taxi might not end up being the end product. Only time will tell.
Personally, the idea of multiplayer Crazy Taxi sounds like good fun, although I’d like there to still be a solo option. I just hope the don’t go down the games-as-a-service route, as I don’t think we need more of those and I don’t think Crazy Taxi has the mass-market appeal to support that kind of model, either.