I'm not sure I've ever had more fun listening to a game developer than when I watch Kenji Kanno introduce Crazy Taxi: World Tour to a small room full of journalists and content creators at Summer Game Fest. He's rocking long, gray hair that paints him as a rock star graced by the wisdom of age, and he speaks with such enthusiasm about the game that it's tough not to get on board with him.
Sega's reasons for bringing back Crazy Taxi are fairly boring – part of an effort to revitalize legacy IP to bring in a new generation of fans. For Kanno? "My biggest personal reason," he tells us via translator, "is that I really wanted to put out a game that can make people happy, that can make people smile as they play and express themselves in their own way."
Time to make some crazy money
Kanno softly sings "yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah" – the line from the opening of The Offspring's All I Want that's burned into so many Crazy Taxi fans' heads – as he demonstrates the basics of World Tour. It instantly looks familiar, offering the same blue skies and wild stunts that made Sega's arcade classic so memorable in the first place.
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It looks doubly familiar since the map I'm seeing is a recreation of the original game's vaguely defined west coast city area. The Crazy Rush mode offers the classic experience of trying to deliver as many passengers to their destinations as you can in as short a time as possible. But there's a whole campaign this time, too, and the map is populated with all sorts of additional activities.
In one mission, you'll drive a pizza chef (confusingly named Cheeseburger) on deliveries, while trying to avoid disturbing the comically huge stack of pies. There's even a fishing mini-game, where you cast out a line from your cab and do a backdash to reel it in. It's all delightful stuff, especially with the promise that we'll be visiting five different countries over the course of the game – though Kanno laughs that "some of the marketing people will get mad at me if I say what countries they are."
Developer: Sega
Platforms: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2
Release date: 2027
I'm desperate to love Crazy Taxi: World Tour, both because Kanno's enthusiasm is infectious and because I'm always going to root for an old-school revival to succeed. But there's a lot here squarely in 'too early to tell' territory. There are clearly some changes to the core gameplay, especially in how you can just power through oncoming traffic and take advantage of a newly-introduced nitrous boost. It's also not immediately clear how old techniques like the backdash and drift work. In the original game, you had to master shifting between drive and reverse in order to pull these techniques off, but just watching somebody else play the game makes these techniques look much simpler than that.
Kanno offered a brief Q&A after the demonstration, but he responded to many of the questions posed by nervously glancing at the PR reps in the room and apologizing profusely for the fact that he couldn't actually answer just yet.
We saw Axel in the demo, but are there other playable characters? Can't say anything beyond "we won't betray your expectation." Does the soundtrack vary between locations? "Sorry," he can't say. There were an array of licensed shops and restaurants in the demo, just like the original game, but Sega emailed me shortly after to ask me not to publish any of them because they're "not yet final."
Most of my time at Summer Game Fest was spent on the ground, so I didn't have much time to see the internet's reaction to the event's announcements – including the revelation that World Tour was built, in part, using generative AI. The difference in vibe between the room where I watched series creator Kenji Kanno pledge to make the world a happier place and the community's actual reaction to the game has been pretty stark, and I've been having a hard time reconciling my own feelings in the month since I've seen the game. The goofy vibes and retro arcade sensibilities speak deeply to my tastes, but without actually playing it I have no idea how good it's going to feel with controller in hand.
What does Kanno have to say to fans who've been desperate for a return to Crazy Taxi for years? "Sorry to keep you waiting," is his simple message. "Crazy Taxi has a very special place in my heart as well. The fact that so many old fans are waiting for it – and so many people know about it right now, and even within the company so many people are very excited and want a new Crazy Taxi – it makes me feel very happy."
