BODY: The fare meter is running again. On June 8, Sega officially announced Crazy Taxi: World Tour, finally putting a name and a face to the "large-scale project" the company first teased back in December 2023. After more than two decades of dormancy outside of ports and mobile spin-offs, the franchise that defined arcade chaos is roaring back.
World Tour is confirmed for a 2027 release across an unusually broad platform spread: PC (Steam and the Microsoft Store), Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. That lineup signals Sega's intent to treat this as a marquee revival rather than a nostalgia footnote—and it makes World Tour one of the earliest major third-party titles publicly committed to Switch 2.
Details on gameplay remain thin, but the title itself hints at a globe-trotting expansion of the original's free-roaming, customer-flinging formula. The first Crazy Taxi, released in arcades in 1999 and ported to the Dreamcast in 2000, became a touchstone for pick-up-and-play design, complete with a punk-rock soundtrack from The Offspring and Bad Religion that fans still associate with the brand.
Sega has positioned World Tour as part of its broader push to resurrect legacy IP, alongside revivals of Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and Shinobi announced in recent years. World Tour is the most concrete of those efforts to date.
The insider take
From Tokyo, the framing matters: Sega executives have repeatedly described this internal revival initiative as a bet on the company's "Super Game" strategy—fewer, bigger, online-capable releases meant to live for years rather than ship and fade. Naming Crazy Taxi specifically as a "large-scale project" suggests Sega is eyeing live-service or persistent-multiplayer ambitions, a notable gamble given how rooted the original was in short, solo arcade runs. Whether longtime fans embrace that shift will be the story to watch.
Originally reported by はてなブックマーク (Japanese).