As you'll probably already know, Sega is gearing up to release a new Crazy Taxi entry next year in the form of Crazy Taxi: World Tour next year, marking the first new title in the series since.

But something that may surprise you is that this isn't the first time a new sequel with this name was apparently proposed.

Earlier this year, Guy Blomberg, a former employee at the now-defunct Sega Studios Australia, revealed that at one point, it, too, had pitched a potential Crazy Taxi 4 in 2009, with World Tour being one of the names considered for the project. Blomberg first shared this story in a thread on Twitter/X, on June 7th, 2026, which is when I first heard about the pitch.

However, despite gaining some traction on the site (52 retweets, 393 likes), it mostly seems to have gone under the radar, with Segabits being the only website we've seen that actually picked up on the news (likely due to the AI controversy around the new game drowning everything else out).

In his account, Blomberg wrote, "I'm a huge Crazy Taxi fan, and so [I'm] glad to see the trailer for the new one. However, I have an interesting related story to share. For a time, I worked at SEGA, and we pitched and prototyped a game we called... Crazy Taxi: World Tour. In 2009.

He continued: "The version we suggested featured stylised variants and exaggerations of different countries (like your city's Chinatown), like France, Australia, Egypt, etc. Each with their iconic landmarks squeezed into them (kinda like Vegas), that justified the World Tour title."

As he explained, the studio pitched a couple of new core mechanics to freshen things up. The first was that "each passenger you pick up adds abilities to your ride - like picking up a basketball player allows you to bounce/jump the car." Some of these, he notes, would have simply been graphic modifiers, giving an example of picking up a disco guy and having a mirror ball appear and disco music playing from the car's stereo, while others would have added "extra challenges" like "picking up a sumo wrestler makes the car heavy and your turning circle impossible, so you can only drift around corners."

As he explained, this meant if you picked up multiple passengers, these different abilities could stack, complementing or offsetting each other, "leading to point multipliers, stacked timers, etc."

The other mechanic, meanwhile, was "an EJECT button," letting you back out of a fare by dramatically catapulting your passenger through the air with ragdoll physics.

Blomberg states, however, that the pitch was never picked up, with the studio instead going to work on what became London 2012, a video game tie-in for the 2012 London Olympics.

Notably, this isn't the first time the existence of a Crazy Taxi pitch from Sega Studios Australia has been made public, with fans noticing concept art for a project called "Crazy Taxi 4" in the portfolio of the former Sega artist Brooke Luder in 2015. I reached out to Blomberg and confirmed the two pitches were linked, but he said that beyond what he had already shared, his memories were pretty "hazy."

He did, however, offer some additional context about when these discussions took place, and some of the other ideas floating around the studio at the time:

"Basically, after the release of Stormrise, which the studio had worked on, there were multiple pitches internally for what to do next. There was a weird JRPG idea, an Olympics game (pitching a lot of Xbox Kinect mechanics, I don't believe it had been revealed publicly at that point), and the Crazy Taxi one. I left there not long after. I think they eventually got a variation of the Olympics game to make. It was a great studio, really passionate folks, headed up by George Fidler. If you wanna try to reach out to him, he might remember more!"

After speaking to Blomberg, I also messaged Fidler and Luder to see if they knew more. Fidler never responded, but Luder told me:

"I wish I could help, but it was a long time ago now. From memory, it was simply a pitch from Sega Australia to potentially work on the project. It certainly wasn't a project that was started and/or cancelled. Obviously we didn't win the pitch, given it didn't go ahead."

Also, just in case you're wondering what that weird JRPG pitch was, I did ask, but sadly, I couldn't find anyone else who remembered it.

The new Crazy Taxi: World Tour is scheduled to release on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2, and PC (via Steam).