One coder’s ‘winter madness project’ was making the Dreamcast-era cityscapes of Crazy Taxi explorable in our browsers

Do you ever wonder if Crazy Taxi is just a little too crazy? Wouldn’t it be nice to explore those beautiful Dreamcast-era cityscapes at your own pace, practically feeling the sun on your skin as you pass every Pizza Hut, KFC, and Fila sportswear store? If your response to that is ‘yes’ and not ‘wow, that game sure had a lot of product placement,’ then I have great news for you: Will at wretched.computer has you covered.

Will’s Crazy Taxi level recreations, described by the programmer as a “winter madness project,” have been added to noclip, a “digital museum of video game levels” started by graphics programmer Jasper St Pierre. Beyond Crazy Taxi, noclip features locales from Mario Kart 64, Psychonauts, Quake, Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, and more—not just rendered any which way, but as Will outlined in a blog post, using “an open source recreation of each of those games’ original rendering methods.”

Will has contributed to the site before, supplying it with fly-around versions of Halo and World of Warcraft. The Crazy Taxi project is exciting not only because it’s the first arcade cabinet I beeline for on the rare occasion that I see it in the wild, but in Will’s words, because it “didn’t already have the secrets of its file formats neatly displayed on a community wiki” or “have any tools already for viewing its maps.”

It’s surreal seeing a level I’ve explored dozens upon dozens of times from a new angle, and without the stress of weaving past trucks on the highway. It gets a little laggy in particularly dense areas, but it works well, and now I wish I could fly around the world like this in nearly every game I own.

It’s also helped me appreciate the world design in Crazy Taxi more, as it’s easy to see just how rife with landmarks the arcade mode level is; oodles of visual cues tell you where you are at any given moment, and the winding roads strike a nice balance between claustrophobic corners that reward precise drifts and long straightaways that let you gun it past every oncoming car. There are also more routes around the downtown area than I realized, which I could probably have taken more advantage of were I better at Crazy Taxi.

Will goes into the technical challenges that arose making this possible, and the post I linked above is the first in a series that will go even deeper. Given that the upcoming “triple-A” Crazy Taxi sequel is still a ways off, this is the most exciting news that the cabbie-gaming community has gotten in awhile.

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