Sega's upcoming Crazy Taxi reboot will be a 'triple-A' game
Crazy Taxi fans, get your hopes high: In an interview with The Japan Times (via Eurogamer), Sapporo Studio president Takaya Segawa said the upcoming new game in the series will be "a triple-A game."
The console version of Crazy Taxi debuted in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast, and it was a hit, eventually being ported to other platforms including the PlayStation 2, Nintendo Gamecube, and yes, even PC. Sequels and spinoffs followed, but aside from a couple of mobile games in the 20-teens, the series has been largely dormant for decades: The last mainline game in the series, Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller, came out in 2002.
The reboot was first reported in 2022 and finally made official in December 2023, although with no details beyond the fact that it's happening and a few seconds of gameplay from a 2023 Game Awards hype clip that also included Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe, and Streets of Rage.
We haven't really heard anything about it since, but the initial report of a new Crazy Taxi game indicated it would be a "big-budget" reboot, and that seems to be holding: Tagawa said Sega's Sapporo Studio is "participating in the development of triple-A titles, including Crazy Taxi."
In all honesty, that doesn't tell us a whole lot. The traditional meaning of "triple-A" revolves around big budgets, big production values, big everything, but amidst the proliferation of indie hits and big-name flops, it's largely become a buzzword rolled out when an executive wants to attract attention to their game. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot recently described Skull and Bones as a "quadruple-A" game, for instance, and that really reinforced for me the fact that we're not dealing with hard-and-fast concepts here.
But in the big picture, what it hopefully means is that Sega has big ambitions for the new Crazy Taxi, and is putting in the resources needed to make it happen. It'll presumably be a while yet before we get to see how that actually comes together: A release target wasn't shared in the 2023 announcement, and Tagawa made no mention of it in the interview. For now, if you want to see what all the excitement is about, the original Crazy Taxi remains available on Steam.