Latest news with #CrazyTaxi
Forbes
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Masayoshi Soken: 'My Father Played Trumpet On Dragon Quest'
Spoken-san on stage in 2023 Masayoshi Soken's career as a composer has spanned more than two decades, but the 50-year-old is most synonymous with his work on 2013's Final Fantasy XIV and its subsequent expansion packs. In 2021, Soken-san shocked fans by revealing he had been battling cancer while writing music for Shadowbringers (an FFXIV add on), but had continued to work on the game while receiving treatment in hospital. Influenced by his father who was a professional trumpet player and his mother, who taught him how to play an electric organ, Soken-san has gone on to produce music for games like 2010's Mario Sports Mix and 2023's Final Fantasy XVI. His eclectic style often blends heavy guitar sounds with soft pianos. Soken-san was in London last weekend to attend this year's Distant Worlds, a concert dedicated to music from Final Fantasy games that has been running since 2007. I spoke with the musician about his life in video games, from the soundtrack that has inspired him the most to the one song he could listen to forever. Super Mario Bros on the NES. That was the first console I owned; there were so many games on it and I used to make promises to my family that if they bought them for me, I'd study really hard. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are the two games that have given me a lot of inspiration. Firstly, playing the games themselves inspired me, but my father was a member of the orchestra on Dragon Quest where he played the trumpet. Back then, we didn't really have the concept of music in games, but Dragon Quest was one of the first times we had a game soundtrack released [separately] There are too many moments to count, but there's one story that springs to mind. At around the same time as the PlayStation One was released, I owned a Sega Saturn because I wanted to play Virtua Fighter 2. I then found out that Final Fantasy VII was only going to come out on the PS1 - I was so disappointed. Now, that little boy who was sad has ended up working at Square Enix making music for Final Fantasy games. It's weird how life works. Crazy Taxi I don't have a particular preference on what genre I write for, but I do have a desire to write for racing games. I think speed and music are a good match. I always loved the Crazy Taxi soundtrack where they pulled in a lot of other artists like The Offspring and Bad Religion. Overwatch 2 - when I'm really busy with work, I don't have a lot of time to play games, but I'm trying my hardest to get more game time in. I'd love to choose a rock song for this, but if I was to listen to that on a loop, it'd be quite difficult after a while. So instead I'll say the Brazilian artist Antônio Carlos Jobim who is a bossa noca artist and the song is The Girl From Ipanema. This one I could loop forever and it would be okay. Distant Worlds will run until January 31 2026 and will next tour in the US on September 13 2025 at the Miller High Life Theatre in Milwaukee, WI.
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I saw taxis as magical things': Sega's pop-punk classic Crazy Taxi at 25
Kenji Kanno, director of Sega's legendary driving game Crazy Taxi, remembers the exact moment he knew the game had made a seismic impression. 'I was going to Las Vegas for promotional work,' he says. 'I got into the taxi and the driver drove me very fast, arriving at my destination quickly. At the end, he laughed and said: 'I am the real Crazy Taxi!' It was a strange experience.' Initially released in arcades, the zany, pop-punk drive-em'-up celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Crazy Taxi was an addictive coin-swallowing thrill ride, the game's eccentric cabbies continually yelling 'Ready to have some fun?' and 'Time to make some crazy money!' in the faces of perturbed-looking normies who simply wish to be chauffeured over to Pizza Hut. Driving green-haired Axel's yellow 1960 Cadillac Eldorado so fast that its front bumper smashed into sunny San Francisco's concrete hills was a memorable experience for all who played. (The Ford Mustang-driving Gena was my mum's character of choice.) I remember losing an entire summer trying to master the 'crazy dash' technique that allowed you to boost faster around corners on the critically acclaimed Sega Dreamcast version of the game (released in 2000 and running at an impressively fluid 60 frames-per-second), instead of going outside to play with my friends. Subsequent ports on the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox 360 drove sales of Crazy Taxi into the millions, creating a hit for Sega at a time where things weren't easy, as the formerly dominant Japanese console manufacturer was on the edge of exiting that business. Rock band the Offspring provided turbo-charged guitar riffs for Crazy Taxi's soundtrack, but that's not the only thing that makes it feel like a time capsule from the turn of the millennium. This game captured the carefree hyperactivity of late 90s/early 00s pre-9/11 America; an era where many young people's biggest worry was whether beer-swilling Stone Cold Steve Austin might retain the WWE world title. Despite its crossover success, Crazy Taxi had a lot of early detractors, Kanno remembers. 'At the beginning of development, more than half of the project members were strongly opposed to the idea of a game about taxi drivers,' he recalls. The way Hollywood had historically framed cabbies made the concept of Crazy Taxi a tough sell for Sega's executives. In the words of Marcello Di Cintio, the author of Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers: 'Cabbies in pop culture have often been characters on the margins. The stereotype, then and now, is that cabbies had a window on the seedy side of urban life, and were part of a nocturnal world the rest of us don't see. Drugs. Alcohol. Sex …' Kanno, though, was much more interested in the less sinister taxi drivers present in Luc Besson's 1998 action-comedy film Taxi, as well as the challenge of turning the guy behind the steering wheel into someone more lovable. Crazy Taxi's drivers are decidedly un-sinister, a bunch of grinning, colourfully dressed thrill-seekers who are the furthest thing from mundane. Kanno wanted the game to do for taxi drivers what Paperboy had done for, well, paperboys. 'I told the team: 'I think it is the job of games creators to make regular jobs look more cool! Even if this is a vision that no one has ever had before, then we should do it.'' Growing up, Kanno found taxis somewhat magical, he says. 'In Japan, taxi doors open automatically. As a child, I wondered why taxi doors opened as you approached them, but my family's car door stayed shut? This was so mind-blowing to me that I came to see taxis as these magical things.' When he got older, Kanno was obsessed with old Hollywood movies, and wanted to capture that same giddy tension and glamour presented in the iconic driving sequences in classics such as The Italian Job and The French Connection. A location such as San Francisco was perfect. 'What I wanted to express the most in Crazy Taxi was the dynamism of movie car chases. I chose San Francisco because it is a city with so many undulations that you can constantly express that kind of action.' Unlike most racing games, Crazy Taxi makes you think on your feet rather than learn its tracks. (Echoes of this chaotic approach can be seen in The Simpsons: Road Rage, which basically took the Crazy Taxi concept over to Springfield.) 'This is a game where players make split-second decisions in constantly changing situations,' Kanno says. 'That's why I made the other vehicles into obstacles. The design is not about memorising every course and taking the best line, but about the player navigating a constantly changing path.' A planned multiplayer mode was cut due to the technical limitations of the time. But the leaderboards still allowed for competitive, wait-your-turn battles between friends. For those who still struggle to last more than two minutes while playing Crazy Taxi (FYI: one rooftop shortcut is a gamechanger), is there any chance of a modern, multiplayer-enabled sequel? 'I can't say much,' replies Kanno. 'But Crazy Taxi will make you smile again soon!'
