JAPAN GAMING & ENTERTAINMENT 
Pick up the passenger with a hand in the air, get them across town before the timer runs out, drop them at the door, and go find the next one. That is the loop your hands run in Crazy Taxi: World Tour. Step outside the story missions, take a fare, and the game slips into something close to Arcade Mode: a clock ticking down, and as many passengers as you can deliver before it hits zero. Everything earned is counted in crazy money, and that count is the score.
The speed boost is not sitting there at the start of a run, either. It has to be earned, by driving well and driving for show. The thing that makes the car faster is paid for with the way the car is driven.
And there is no way for the score to go down. Points come in; points never come off. Good driving scores. Bad driving simply does not score.
Kenji Kanno, who directed and designed the 1999 original Crazy Taxi and is creative producer on this one, has given a straightforward reason for that. A miss, he has said, is an action that failed to earn points — not a failure. Positivity is the principle that guides his design. What he wants is for a player who has just wrecked a run to want another one.
The first city SEGA showed is on the West Coast
World Tour, the campaign the game is named after, is the first full story mode the series has had. The reveal trailer follows Axel, the long-running series protagonist, through a city he plainly knows, until a mysterious new driver turns up and sends him off on an international trip. Kanno has said the starting point was a question about what drivers would do if their own car were stolen. Building the game around five cities came from wanting players to feel like they are travelling the world.
SEGA is revealing those cities one at a time. The first, shown in an official trailer in July 2026, is the West Coast map, a run of hills and streets that calls San Francisco to mind. The second, announced in August, is Germany: a cathedral, an old castle, and an autobahn running out past the edge of town. Real storefronts stand in that city too, and SEGA has named PUMA and ZWILLING among them. The remaining three cities have not been announced.
Six drivers, one street full of fares
Online multiplayer is new to the series, and both of the modes SEGA has shown so far pit players against each other. Pickup Race drops up to six of them into the same city on the same clock, each trying to complete more fares — and bank more crazy money — than the rest. Cops ‘n’ Cabbies splits the field into two teams. Steam’s description says drivers can take on friends and other players around the world, across platforms.
Five platforms in 2027, and no date yet
Crazy Taxi: World Tour is coming in 2027, with no date announced yet. SEGA is developing and publishing it internally, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch 2, and the Steam listing has English in both text and audio.
It started in the lane beside a traffic jam
The refusal to subtract points is not new thinking. Kanno has traced the original back to the period right after Top Skater, the arcade game he worked on before it, when a manager told him demand for driving games was high. The idea itself arrived off the clock. Sitting in traffic, Kanno thought about how good it would feel to slip into the next lane and keep moving. Car-chase films were popular at the time, and he has said that convinced him the audience was there.
Three things had to line up
Kanno has described the new game as three developments converging at once. He wanted to build a story-driven campaign mode. A manager asked him about bringing the series back. And SEGA had a policy of reviving titles from its own back catalogue. He has also pointed to how loudly players in North America and Europe had been asking for a return.
That demand had already shown itself in public. The teaser SEGA ran at The Game Awards in 2023 drew a reaction from fans around the world that Kanno has said gave the team courage. The full announcement came in June 2026 at Xbox Games Showcase 2026, with a trailer alongside it.
The songs get picked first
When Kanno builds an action game, he has said, the music is the first thing he locks down. For World Tour he went through more than a hundred tracks before choosing, using groove as the measure. The 1999 game ran on The Offspring’s “All I Want” and “Change the World” and Bad Religion’s “Ten in 2010”, and those songs became fixtures for Dreamcast owners and for the people who played the game in arcades. All three of them were in the World Tour demo. Kanno has said The Offspring showed how deeply they understood the game, and that he is pleased with how the collaboration went.
What has not moved since 1999
The part of the design that has not changed is that nothing is taken away from you. What has changed is where the driving happens — five cities rather than one — and how many other people are chasing the same passengers. When a run ends, what is sitting in front of you is not a list of what went wrong. It is a reason to take another one.
Sources: SEGA’s official newsroom and Steam store listing; Famitsu; Denfaminicogamer; 4Gamer.net; Video Games Chronicle; Game Informer. Kanno’s remarks are translated from Japanese-language interviews.