Crazy Taxi

The opening riff by The Offspring kicks in, the light turns green and you tear off into the streets with a roar. Crazy Taxi by Sega is not about traffic rules, it is about getting your passenger to their destination as fast, as insanely and with as much contempt for the physics of parking spaces as possible.

The game came out of the Hitmaker studio (Sega's internal team) and arrived in arcades at the end of the nineties, where it ran on the Sega NAOMI board. The principle is brilliantly simple: you pick up passengers who have a color-coded destination floating above their heads and try to deliver them before time runs out. The bolder the ride - slides, jumps and near misses - the bigger the tip. This created an original cocktail of arcade racing and score chasing, where every second counts.

Crazy Taxi became famous for its carefree pace and an open city full of ramps, shortcuts and traffic that served mainly as an obstacle course. Special techniques like the Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift were key, turning an ordinary ride into a matter of style and mastery. The soundtrack by bands like The Offspring and Bad Religion perfectly underlined the punky, defiant mood.

Sega quickly turned its arcade success into a hit on the home Dreamcast too, where the game became one of the console's most beloved titles, and it later spread to other platforms. Several sequels followed and the game inspired a whole wave of imitators; with its open take on driving, it indirectly shaped how the next generation of creators looked at arcade racing.

Crazy Taxi is pure joy of play in the best sense of the word. Nothing holds you back, no story, just you, a yellow taxi and a chaotic city. It is the kind of experience you return to whenever you feel like five minutes of unbridled fun.

Why play: For an instant, addictive arcade ride where adrenaline and style matter more than the rules of the road.