Development
The original arcade game was developed by Hitmaker as a variation from then-current arcade titles. Crazy Taxi producer Kenji Kanno noted that the time extension on gameplay was a breakaway of the current "100 yen for 3 minutes" that persisted at the time for arcade games, and rewarded players with longer playing times by performing well in the game. In addition to providing a game that could be played in short sessions, Kanno wanted a game to explore the "daily life and routine" of a taxi driver. In the development of the Dreamcast version of the original arcade game, the developers included a larger map in addition to the arcade one, as to create a feeling of "being lost" and allowing home console players to have fun "learning the town". Mini-games were developed for this version as to "let the player play longer if he improve skill" by offering challenges that were both fun and educational. Over one hundred different ideas for mini-games were developed by the team but then pared down for the Crazy Box mini-game challenges for the game. The addition of the Crazy Hop in Crazy Taxi 2 came about because the development team noted that "...in New York - where the basic landscape is quite flat - we had to create 3D space by letting the player drive on the buildings" and "We added the Crazy Hop to let the player hop around the roofs of buildings to make short cuts".
Hitmaker had tried to develop an on-line version of Crazy Taxi, to be called Crazy Taxi Next exclusively for the Xbox, which, besides multiplayer game modes, would have included night and day cycles, each with a different set of passengers and destinations, while reusing and graphically updating the maps from Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2. Ultimately, both multiplayer and day/night cycles were dropped and work on Crazy Taxi Next was transferred to Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller, which included some of the nighttime driving concepts suggested by Next.
Kenji Kanno has noted that the gameplay in the Crazy Taxi series has otherwise not "evolved" with each new game "because basically the whole point of the game is to have a lot of fun in a short period of time, and it's a very concentrated game. So instead of trying to evolve the series necessarily, it's more like taking that concept and putting it in different places—seeing how it works."
Read more about this topic: Crazy Taxi (series)
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