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Yeah, But Is It Art?: Crazy Taxi

Posted by John Constantine

Time is both the best friend and worst enemy of art. Culture shifts and morphs daily into new language and new modes of expression, and the voice of the past either becomes timeless or unintelligible in tandem. Author David Lindsay was no one in the 1920s while he was still publishing. He was thirty years dead by the time his hallucinatory novel A Voyage to Arcturus was celebrated by academia. Alternatively, Our American Cousin was considered great comedy and great theater a century and a half back. Today, you’d be hard pressed to understand what the damn script even means. Enduring works persist for a number of reasons. They speak to an unchanging facet of human experience (love, loss, etc.) or they stay durable through sheer architectural integrity, perfect examples of their medium (I can find no other reason why people continue to read Melville.) Sometimes, though, art survives as a time capsule, something that takes a place and a time, no matter how insignificant, and preserves it.



Crazy Taxi, in its American Dreamcast release, is the millennial turn preserved in digital amber. More than even the early editions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crazy Taxi’s character models, its Offspring-laden mall-punk soundtrack, the growling “extreme” announcer and its pigeon-LA and San Francisco are a pitch-perfect distillation of pop-consumer culture in 2000. Its presentation is complimented by manic arcade-style driving, a kinetic representation of pre-war American tastes at the end of the ‘90s. It holds up too, fun despite comparing poorly to more dynamic contemporaries like Burnout Paradise; if you drive into a wall, you bounce off of it instead of watching a complex physics engine realistically crumple your taxicab. Burnout is a fitting counterpoint; while Crazy Taxi is concerned only with driving at top speed and bright colors, Burnout’s most visceral moments are during crashes, when everything is slowed to a stop, color becomes washed out, and the game halts to focus on destruction.

Of course, that’s just one argument. What do you say, reader?

More Yeah, But Is It Art?:

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Comments

Nemo Incognito said:

If Crazy Taxi were pitched today it wouldn't be passed without adding vehicle damage, ragdoll physics for run-over bystanders and a story mode about a rookie cabbie earning respect by running missions for the local gangsters.  It just wouldn't be the same.

August 22, 2008 5:56 PM

Demaar said:

I say I got tired of Burnout Paradise's over the top crashes within the month of buying it. Sure, it's cool and stuff, but they needed an option to turn off the cinematic crashes. Sometimes I just want to mess about and see what I can pull off without the fun being halted every couple of minutes.

August 23, 2008 4:05 PM

Demaar said:

Sorry for the double post, but obviously what I was saying above isn't directly related to Crazy Taxi. What I mean is, I can definitely see the appeal of going back to it.

Also, Nemo's right, if Crazy Taxi were released today it'd have no soul. It'd be a mess of current marketing trends and PR spread-sheetery.

August 23, 2008 4:07 PM

John H. said:

Yes, Crazy Taxi wouldn't be the same with vehicle damage and stuff, but as for the reason why....

It's an arcade game.  Anything that slows down the game diminishes that spirit.  In an arcade, it'd also diminish earnings.  Anything that slows down the pace is going to be a mis-feature.

(And the pace, for the record, is AWESOME.  Crazy Taxi is my favorite Dreamcast game.  My high score is nearly $70,000....)

August 25, 2008 6:08 PM

jonas said:

Well i admit i somehow become immured with the music and the giddy comments watching the video. I imagine this game has a decent replay value. Remember only playing this at arcade, but very few times

August 25, 2008 10:41 PM

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about the blogger

John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Hooksexup, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.

Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.

Nadia Oxford is a housekeeping robot who was refurbished into a warrior when the world's need for justice was great. Now that the galaxy is at peace (give or take a conflict here or there), she works as a freelance writer for various sites and magazines. Based in Toronto, Nadia prizes the certificate from the Ministry of Health declaring her tick and rabies-free.

Bob Mackey is a grad student, writer, and cyborg, who uses the powerful girl-repelling nanomachines mad science grafted onto his body to allocate time towards interests of the nerd persuasion. He believes that complaining about things on the Internet is akin to the fine art of wine tasting, but with more spitting into buckets.

Joe Keiser has a programming degree from Johns Hopkins University, a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and a fake toy guitar built in the hollowed-out shell of a real guitar. He writes about games and technology for a variety of outlets. One day he will stop doing this. The day after that, police will find his body under a collapsed pile of (formerly neatly alphabetized) collector's edition tchotchkes.

Cole Stryker is an American freelance writer living in York, England, where he resides with his archeologist wife. He writes for a travel company by day and argues about pop culture on the internet by night. Find him writing regularly here and here.

Peter Smith is like the lead character of Irwin Shaw's The 80-Yard Run, except less athletic. He considers himself very lucky to have this job. But it's a little premature to take "jack-off of all trades" off his resume. Besides writing, travelling, and painting houses, Pete plays guitar in a rock trio called The Aye-Ayes. He calls them a 'power pop' band, but they generally sound more like Motorhead on a drinking binge.


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