Crazy Taxi | Why I Love

Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by Tim FitzRandolph, the solo-dev otherwise known as Walaber, who recently released Parking Garage Rally Circuit, an arcade racer where you drift around parking garages now available on Steam.

My college had an entertainment center with a mini bowling alley, billiards, and some arcade game cabinets. One game in particular was quite fun. I'd play it once or twice a week, and I thought I was getting pretty good at it, able to play for about five minutes or so on a single play.

One day I had just finished a pretty solid round, when I realized someone had been waiting to play their turn. I stuck around to watch them play. They played for what felt like 45 minutes on a single play (in reality it was probably more like 10-15 minutes). My mind was blown. They were doing things in the game I had never seen. A game I thought I knew pretty well had a layer of depth that I had no idea about. Actually, not just one layer, more like ten layers. I was hooked.

As you may have guessed from the article title, the game in question was none other than the Sega AM3 arcade classic Crazy Taxi. If you've played the original, you probably remember the San Francisco-ish city in which the game takes place, with your first fare in the game taking you down some steep streets with trolley cars and traffic to avoid.

When you first play the game, it probably looks like this:

The player I was watching was doing THIS:

I was astounded. Carefully watching them play, they were doing an interesting technique: let go of the gas pedal, shift into Reverse while coasting, then slam the shifter into Drive and floor the pedal a moment later. This granted a sudden burst of speed, which they then repeated rhythmically to reach higher and higher speeds. Needless to say, I started mimicking this technique and was able to start to pull it off reliably, instantly doubling my best score.

This single mechanic has probably stuck with me more than any other game mechanic I've encountered. On the surface, it is very simple and only manipulating a single property of the car: its speed.

The speed of the car changes over time based on two more parameters: acceleration and top speed. The input sequence I mentioned below can actually be broken into two parts: (1) release the pedal, shift into reverse, and (2) shift into drive, floor the pedal. Part 2 actually works when the car is parked: it massively increases the car's acceleration, allowing players to reach their top speed much more quickly.

But when players perform this action again while driving at top speed (first doing Part 1 to 'reset the input state' and then Part 2 to trigger the boost), something new happens. Instead of just increasing the acceleration (which wouldn't help that much, the player is already at or near the car's top speed), it temporarily increases the top speed of the car. Here is my artist's rendition of what's happening to the top speed of the car:

Now comes the part that truly lets the game live up to its name. If you perform this same action (called a 'limit cut,' according to the developers) while at the boosted top speed, it stacks and increases the top speed of the car even further, seemingly without limit.

This is the trick that allows skilled players to jump down the entire hill at the beginning of the game, perform other big shortcuts, and generally just drive at breakneck speeds.

After seeing this technique in person, I started doing some online research into the game, and discovering tons of other techniques like crazy drifts, ways to use the environment combined with drifts to come to a stop more quickly (sometimes instantly!) when dropping off customers, and how the city was set up with chains of routes that you could optimize to avoid having to turn around (wasting valuable time), and instead do “laps” around the city by smartly choosing the correct fares in each section of the city. If you're curious, this site is a great place to start.

My goal as a developer is to one day make a game that causes a similar reaction in players as Crazy Taxi did for me

My entire college experience was set to the tune of The Offspring's 'All I Want' and Bad Religion's 'Ten in 2010' from the game's soundtrack as I punctuated classes, studying, and socializing with continuing to improve my high score at the Crazy Taxi cabinet. Naturally, I ended up buying a Sega Dreamcast and getting the home version and steering wheel as well to play in my dorm.

These days people often talk about modern games with 'hidden' mechanics that you don't unlock in-game, they are enabled at all times, and you simply need to know about them to use them (recent examples include Tunic, Animal Well, Outer Wilds). Looking back I realize that for me, Crazy Taxi was my first introduction to a game with a similar design philosophy: layers of systems that don't need to be discovered to enjoy the game, but are waiting there for adventurous players to discover. I've drawn the above diagrams on many whiteboards throughout my game design career, explaining the deep boost stacking mechanics of Crazy Taxi to my peers. Something about this game has stuck with me beyond any game I've played before or after.

It's probably why my latest release Parking Garage Rally Circuit also happens to be a 'wild' driving game about rally racing in parking garages, and you can stack boosts in an unlimited way with no speed cap – it makes you feel like you are closer and closer to losing control of the car, and that feeling is intoxicating (something I most definitely first experienced with Crazy Taxi). I'll never forget the first time I was going so fast on the highway in the game that my car turned sideways and rocketed / glitched past traffic.

Modern console re-releases of the game have added a 'Crazy Box' section which consists of mini-challenges that introduce you to the game's deep control mechanics, and give you a chance to learn them in isolation. This is a great idea, and certainly a better way to ensure players discover the depth to the game, but nothing will beat the shock I felt watching that anonymous player open up the game right before my eyes, and show me that there was still so much more to learn about my favorite game.

I think my entire goal as a game developer is to one day make a game that causes a similar reaction in players as Crazy Taxi did for me.