Sega Gamer's Day 2000: Sega Announces Crazy Taxi 2

At Sega's Executive Games Summit event held in San Francisco today, Sega officially announced that Hitmaker, the team responsible for the first Crazy Taxi, is hard at work on the sequel. Simply called Crazy Taxi 2, the game will be a bigger and better version of the original, except with a harder, more edgy feel.

As the city in Crazy Taxi was loosely based on San Francisco, the city in Crazy Taxi 2 will be based on New York. The city promises to be much bigger than the city in the first game, and Sega is confident that the slowdown that plagued the first game will not be an issue in CT2. The game will feature plenty of new drivers, as well as a few favorites from the first game. Additionally, Hitmaker is focusing on expanding the gameplay of the series and is planning to offer new mission objectives and side quests in the game. Along with the game's new look, Crazy Taxi 2 will feature a whole new musical style, and while Sega wouldn't comment on what sort of genre the soundtrack would feature, it did say that the music would be "harder" than the music in the last game. Additionally, Sega hinted at the possibility of a multiplayer mode but announced no solid details regarding this.

Sega was quick to point out that while the first Crazy Taxi was originally developed as a Naomi-based arcade game and was ported to the Dreamcast, the sequel is being developed with the Dreamcast in mind and may not even make it to arcades. Hitmaker is also exploring the possibility of online play, but with a summer 2001 release date, it seems rather unlikely that anything more than VMU downloads and a ranking system will appear in the game.