New details emerge on abandoned Crazy Taxi 4 pitch

Back in 2015 we learned that SEGA Studios Australia had created artwork for a Crazy Taxi 4 pitch that had likely taken place years earlier. Just this week, with the announcement of Crazy Taxi: World Tour, a former SEGA Creative Assembly staffer who worked at the Brisbane, Australia offices from 2009-2010 revealed details of a Crazy Taxi: World Tour pitch that may have tied in with the previously revealed pitch art.

Guy Blomberg, the former staffer, shared a thread on X/Twitter with the following details:

I’m a huge Crazy Taxi fan, and so glad to see the trailer for the new one, however I have an interesting related story to share. For a time I worked at SEGA, and we pitched and prototyped a game we called… Crazy Taxi: World Tour. In 2009.

The version we suggested featured stylized variants and exaggerations of different countries (like your cities Chinatown) like France, Australia, Egypt, etc. Each with their iconic landmarks squeezed into them (kinda like Vegas), that justified the World Tour title.

We had 2 other new core mechanics we pitched. One was that each passenger you pick up adds abilities to your ride – like picking up a basketball player allows you to bounce/jump the car. Some would simply be graphic modifiers, like picking up a disco guy pops up a mirror ball from the car and disco music starts playing from the radio. Some created extra challenges, like picking up a sumo wrestler makes the car heavy and your turning circle impossible, so you can only drift around corners.

This also meant when you picked up multiple passengers they would have different abilities that could compliment or offset each other, leading to point multipliers, stacked timers, etc. The other mechanic we played around with was so much fun – if you weren’t going to make the delivery of your passenger, you could press an EJECT button to catapult them into the air. With rag doll physics they would fly through the air, but you have some control to move them around and try to get them to land in the drop off area.

This was one of many new game concepts pitched, I think the studio eventually ended up doing an Olympics game, but it was a lot of fun playing around briefly in the Crazy Taxi world, even if just conceptually. Finally, if you haven’t seen it, check out the trailer for the new Crazy Taxi: World Tour (feat the Offspring All I Want right away) – it brings me joy, can’t wait to play it!

We’ve reached out to Guy for clarification on the previously released Crazy Taxi 4 pitch art and these new details to see if they are from the same pitch. Given both the art and Guy come from the same Brisbane offices from the late 2000s and early 2010s it is likely.

What are your thoughts on the concepts from this abandoned sequel?