My recent onslaught of Crazy Taxi posting has caused a lot of my friends to revisit the game and attempt to play for score. Unfortunately, the game can be rather sparse with detail on how its own systems work, and the customer routing element of the game is completely opaque. As I’ve researched this game’s mechanics, both on my own and from watching high-level play, I’ve also noticed that many of the FAQs and guides from around the time of the game’s release have misconceptions or insufficient detail, making them occasionally a hindrance to succeeding rather than a boon. Although I’d like to put together a more complete customer guide in the future, I’ve compiled together enough information here to get you from starter level to the Crazy License rank on the Arcade map without having to memorize sheets of customer information.

If you’re trying to grab a copy quickly, Crazy Taxi has unfortunately been delisted on Steam. Some of my friends have had success purchasing a code for it off of Amazon, but checking this link now it seems unavailable (though it likely means you can find the codes on other storefronts). If you get a hold of this version or already own it, make sure to install these two patches to get the original Dreamcast assets and analog steering back. If you would rather go the emulation route, Dolphin seems to be the preferable choice; having played the GameCube version here and there, I can confirm that it plays great, with the only noticeable issue being its dull lighting. Various Dreamcast emulators are also viable, but I haven’t found an acceptable one that isn’t riddled with input lag.

General Mechanics

I assume that you’re familiar with the basics of Crazy Taxi: pick up customers, race to their destination indicated by the arrow at the top, and drop them off quickly to gain more seconds on the timer. You may also be familiar with the special techniques, especially if you sunk some time into the Crazy Box mission mode in the home ports. Before you get too far into the weeds on the routing, you’ll want to be comfortable with each of these. Take some time in Crazy Box or sit in the 10 minute mode to get a feel for the timing of the Crazy Dash and Limiter Cut. As you start increasing your overall speed, you’ll find yourself creeping up to \$10,000 before too long without having any strategy in mind for the customers. Here’s a few tips that you’ll want to understand as you continue to refine your play:

• Holding the gear-shift buttons will help elongate your Crazy Drifts. It sounds ridiculous, but it seems to work.
• Although the site above lists it in the Additional Skills section, Crazy Backdash is also extremely useful after customer pick-ups.
• I think holding gas after shifting into reverse for the (fake) Crazy Stop is preferable. It’s not a significant difference, but it helped me line up my stops better. Make sure to abuse breakable objects (such as phone booths) for stops when they’re available.
• The amount of different ways listed to do Crazy Drift on the site are no joke: the move is extremely organic and depends heavily on how many Limiter Cuts you’ve stacked to reach your current speed.
• As listed on the Miscellaneous Info page, your front and back hitboxes have different properties when they slam into objects. Try to hit with the back as often as possible to stop the car in place. Wall-stick is a great parlor trick but can jeopardize your run if you can’t unstick yourself.
• Practice weaving between cars to perform Crazy Throughs as often as you can. Your combo multiplier will increase on every one, and while Crazy Drift is a more lucrative method for increasing it, Crazy Through is more practical for each and every customer compared to the more situational Drift and Crazy Jump.

The other half of this is learning how the customers work, which the game gives you considerably less information on. The color system is intuitive: each customer falls on a spectrum between red and green, where the former customers will take you somewhere close, and latter customers will take you far away. This also affects the pick-up zone radius, which varies in size depending on the distance to the destination.¹ No matter the size, however, you’ll always want to stop as close as possible to the customer without “spooking” them (making them jump away). Just as the tip says above, your front and back hitboxes provoke different reactions in the customers; your back hitbox won’t spook them, making backing directly into customers or swinging your back end close to them on a turn viable.

Each customer has a larger spawn radius, and when the player enters their circle, the customer will spawn and their destination will remain fixed until they unspawn or are picked up. Their destination is chosen based on the current global destination set that is active; there are three separate sets of destinations, and they rotate in sequence every 10 seconds.² As you might surmise from this, the customer destinations are actually completely deterministic, to the extent that you can theoretically track the destinations of each customer deterministically across your entire run. For my first half of my opening loop, I can generally tell how I’m doing efficiency-wise based on the customer destinations that I see, given that I select the same customers every opening. However, tracking this over the course of a run gets pretty infeasible given the length; expect a \$20,000 run to take at least 20 minutes, with my runs around \$65,000 taking about an hour and a half! It doesn’t help that randomized traffic will inevitably cause the times at which you spawn customers to fluctuate at least a little bit every single run, decreasing the certainty of your position in the global timer the longer you play.

Customers have an assigned destination in each set, though it may be the same as other sets or may mark the customer as “inactive,” in which case they’ll spawn but won’t have any sort of marker to pick them up. This allows us to characterize each customer differently depending on their traits. Some customers are “guaranteed,” where they always spawn and always want to go to the same destination. Others may always want to go to one place but only show up in specific destination sets, while others may have multiple destinations at distinct distances, making it clear where they want to go based on their color. It gets trickier with the many, many customers that have multiple ambiguous destinations, especially when said destinations are in completely opposite directions from the pick-up point. Due to the way the destination set system functions, you can often use the definitive customers to help determine where the ambiguous ones want to go on the fly, but this gets into the reams of customer memorization that makes high-level Crazy Taxi impenetrable to the average player. This guide will try to get you to a Crazy License without having to resort to that.

Map Details

The original site this came from doesn’t seem to exist anymore, but it’s a nice clean resource regardless. [src]

The Arcade map for Crazy Taxi is unique in the series for its loop structure, where each location falls within some node of this ring shape without any way to skip areas. This also means that it’s possible to make a full lap around the map and end up back at your starting point, which gives you the best chance to repeatedly cash in on the easier customers at the first part of the map. To do this, you’ll want to pick up as many customers as you can that will take you “forward” (in this representation, counter-clockwise). “Backwards” (clockwise) customers aren’t a bad thing long-term, but if you pick one up without anticipating their direction, you’ll lose valuable seconds turning around, and without practice there’s a good chance you’ll be less proficient at the backwards routes.

I generally divide the map into two halves: the first starts at the University and ends at the Baseball Stadium, and the second starts at the Police Station and ends at the Tennis Court. The dividing factor between the two is the highway, which circles back on itself between Baseball Stadium and Police Station. The highway is a blessing and a curse, as it’s the longest section without customers in the game, but it’s surrounded by high-value light green and green customers who want to cross it, and the structure of always moving traffic makes it easy to rack up Crazy Throughs. It’s possible to get Crazy License primarily by grinding highway-bound customers³, but in general this isn’t a particularly future-proof way to learn the game if you wish to keep pushing your score past \$20,000.

There’s no skill level for the game where exploiting the highway isn’t useful, however. The best runners will gain absurd amounts of time through tight execution and then, at the end of the run, perform what’s known as “Highway Reverse,” where they travel forward across the highway without a customer, grab a backwards customer to take across the highway, and then repeat until time has expired. A major reason for this is that there are only 16 forward highway-bound customers, and you’ll want to use all 16 of them for looping, not for criss-crossing the highway to grab the 18 reciprocal customers going backwards over the highway.

Get used to drifting off of the downward ledge near R.B. Station and flying into the parking lot in order to reach Baseball Stadium. You’ll find yourself saving a lot of time this way.

You’ll see your first backwards customers once you get to the Square Park area, although they won’t take you back very far (no customers will ever take you back further than Cafeteria). They’ll continue to show up sparingly until becoming more present on the large hill past the Church. The nice aspect of the highway here is that when you’re in the Heliport / R.B. Station / Baseball Stadium range, light green and green customers will always take you over the highway, and in the Downtown 1 section (the double diamond from Police Station to just before Mall W), the only backwards customers are green due to the amount of distance it takes to get back to the areas that cap off the first half. However, these two Downtown sections (including Downtown 2, which is the second diamond containing Crown Arena and Osmous Hotel) have backwards or inter-area customers all over the place, and many novice players get walled at Bus Terminal or Lookout Tower due to their rather difficult customer layout that heavily favors backwards customers.

With all of that in mind, there’s a few more things that are useful to know when navigating the map:

• There’s no reason to use the parking deck past FILA / Popcorn Mania for shortcuts. You’ll want to go up there mainly to access a particular customer as discussed later.
• When approaching KFC, always take a left for the route with only a single turn. You’ll find this one much quicker to take consistently than the chicane on the other side. You should take the same path on backwards trips to the area. The main reason to take the chicane is to get the yellow customer back there, which always takes you to R.B. Station.
• You probably already know to go straight up the hill past the Church, as there’s no off-road penalty speed-wise in this game. However, it takes more effort to start drifting off of the side of the ramp leading down to R.B. Station shortly after. You should consistently be able to fly off and land with your side in the wall of the parking lot past the R.B. Station assuming you’re trying to go to Baseball Stadium or Police Station.
• I generally find wall-riding the oncoming traffic lane for the first half of the highway useful for Crazy Throughs before switching to the other wall before the turn. Make sure to Limiter Cut into the wall as many times as you can to avoid losing speed from the friction.
• When entering Downtown 1 going forward, go all the way left to get to Sky Bank and all the way right to get to CT Hospital. You generally don’t want to waste time taking the middle section, despite what your arrow guide will tell you to do. Do the reverse when approaching Downtown 1 backwards.
• Never go through the mall if you can help it. The only time I ever do it is for red customers that go from one mall entrance to the other.
• It’s generally better to approach the straight section between Downtown 2 and Bus Terminal from the Osmous Hotel side, as you’ll avoid an unnecessary turn despite what this map shows. When going forward, always take the oncoming traffic lane; it’s less busy than the other lane and you’ll find it easier to maneuver around the cars this way (although it’s still not easy). With Gena I can hug the right wall to get past cars that aren’t buses or WOW trucks, though it may not be as consistent with some of the wider cars. The tunnel underneath and the other lane are virtually never worth it, no matter which direction you’re approaching from.
• For the chicanes past the Tennis Court, take the left side every time. I haven’t spent much time testing the shortcut there to see if starting on the right side and switching to the left is useful, but I also never see top players use it.

Walkthrough

For this guide, I’m going to be explaining a route that helps you avoid the most problematic areas in the run, which are generally Church, Heliport, Bus Terminal, and Lookout Tower. Higher-level play will require you to engage with every area of the map to avoid running out of customers in other areas, but I found that because these areas require significant memorization, it’s best to slowly ease them in once you’re in Crazy License range. You should be able to get up to this point without learning how to read the destination sets at all.

First Half

Granny, or Grandma J according to the manual, is one of the most important customers in the game. Unfortunately, she’s rather far out of the way.

The nice thing about all customers going forward early on is that there’s almost nowhere you can go wrong, so feel free to take whoever is closest for the first part of each loop. Once you get to the Square Park area, you’ll want to begin thinking more critically about which customers you choose. Anything customer taking you further than orange out of this location will take you to either Church and Heliport, which you’ll want to avoid. Thankfully, there’s plenty of safe orange customers in this area. You also have the chance here to take “Granny,” the old lady on top of an awning outside of the parking deck past FILA and Popcorn Mania. She’s consistently available and wants to go all the way to Police Station, majorly expediting your loop and paying you handsomely for it (often to the tune of at least \$1,000). It’s worth practicing picking her up, as flying too quickly out of the parking deck will often result in you overshooting and landing around Levi’s, throwing away all the time you spent climbing up there in the first place. Still, taking her is an essential part of virtually every run. There’s also a couple ways to skip this section, primarily by taking the green customer underwater near West Side Beach to KFC. Driving underwater requires you to use Crazy Dash to even move at all though, so make sure you’re comfortable with the advanced techniques before trying this out.

Clockwise from the top left: one of the green customers viewable from the edge of the Levi’s drop zone. The yellow customer behind KFC. The light green customer at the start of the hill area. The light green customer around the corner from KFC.

Once you’re at either Levi’s or Tower Records / KFC, you have plenty of options to leapfrog over to R.B. Station or Baseball Stadium. If you position yourself at the front-left edge of the Levi’s drop zone, you should be able to check for one of two green customers up the staircase; these both take you to Baseball Stadium. A customer right before Tower Records and a customer across from it each turn green and light green, respectively, with both wanting to go to Baseball Stadium. All four of these options are great, but may not be available at any given point. If none of these are nearby, the aforementioned yellow customer in the chicane directly behind KFC is guaranteed to R.B. Station. The other route has a customer down the stretch that is often light green to Baseball Stadium; when he’s orange, you can generally continue on to find another light green customer across from the church. This gives seven options to avoid Church / Heliport entirely, with an additional eighth option including Granny.

While these customers in the middle of the island near R.B. Station can be taken (in this case, the one on the right goes forward), it’s easier to grab guaranteed greens from the edges of the areas.

Upon reaching R.B. Station or Baseball Stadium, you’ll be in the clear to cross the highway as long as you grab a green or light green. At Baseball Stadium, where you’ll end up more often than not, you have a sea of options in these colors without any danger of getting sent backwards. Try to pick up the customer in the drop zone whenever she’s light green, because it’ll keep her from interfering with your drop-offs for future loops. There’s also light greens further on between the trees at the mouth of the highway that may not be immediately evident. For your occasional landings at R.B. Station, avoid the customers in the island in the middle of the roundabout; these have a method for telling who will send you forward, but you shouldn’t need it at this level of play. Greens on the edges of this area are guaranteed forward.

Downtown

Downtown 1 is the richest area for customers in the game, so finding your path forward here should be simple… unless you end up at Boarder’s Paradise. Because of its close proximity to the exit for the area, the customers available without turning around are fewer than that of the other areas, which have easy forward access to the sides of Downtown. It doesn’t help that for our case we’re trying to avoid Bus Terminal and Lookout Tower, and these destinations are the majority of forward customers near the dropoff point. These destinations manifest as light green generally, and what we’re more interested in is oranges and yellows, which will take us over to Downtown 2. These you can find virtually anywhere except on the islands on the middle of the cross/scramble, so scrape the sides of the buildings looking for these customers and you’re sure to find them. In the case of Boarder’s Paradise, either plan to take the red customer back to Clock Tower Theater, or go backwards a little bit to get a customer that will work for you.

Clockwise from the top left: the yellow and light green at the entrance to Downtown 2. One of the light greens that can appear in the scramble. An alternate view of the same light green, with the cut-through containing the tennis player visible. A close-up of the tennis player.

Onto Downtown 2. This area is a complete minefield, with many, many customers that will take you back to Downtown 1 or the Mall. Memorizing this area is difficult, but there’s a few easy options that we want to take. To get to Fire Station, we want to look for one of the light greens in the scramble in the middle of the area. While yellows also take you forward here, it’s to Lookout Tower, so beware. There are also two customers to the left of the area entrance that each take you forward, one of which is a light green to Fire Station. You can check these coming from Mall W, or you can park backwards at a Crown Arena, which also lets you take a left into the scramble if the entrance customer isn’t there. If none of these are available and you have some time, you can snag the tennis player in the cut-through on the corner of the scramble closest to the area exit. This will take you to Tennis Court, which is close enough to both Fire Station and the University that we can make it work.

End of the Loop

Congratulations! If you’ve made it to Fire Station, you’re nearly done with your loop. At the drop point, you have three customers that are guaranteed trips to University if they’re light green: the customer who occasionally shows up in the drop zone itself, and the two right-most customers in the triangle behind the drop zone. If you pull forward into the slopes area, any light green on the outer two paths is guaranteed to take you to University. Whatever time you spend here looking for a customer will undoubtedly be made up once you play the first half of the map again.

On the left, you can see the customers around Fire Station. If one of the customers on the right close to the fence (the furthest light green one and the orange one, in this picture) are light green, their destination is University. The one that appears in the drop zone is also light green to University. On the right, you can see an example of one of the side slopes near the station. Again, light greens here take you to University.

You may also end up at Tennis Court here, either because you took the tennis player in Downtown 2 or because you started improvising. Any orange here will take you either forward to University or backwards to Fire Station, each of which are great outcomes. If you’re curious, none of them are ambiguous: the customers directly ahead of and directly behind the drop zone go to University, as well as the first customer to the left you see when you drive up the hill. Regardless, if you forget the order, then you can take any orange assuming that it’s a good option, although it’s not a bad idea to park perpendicular to the road when you do so so that you can pull out in the correct direction no matter what destination you get.

Once you get back to the University, you’ll actually be ahead of the three oranges at the spawn point, with a selection of yellows, light greens, and greens ahead of you. Generally the further the distance, the better, so take whichever you like, although going to Sea Side Market (the light green destination) over and over again might cause you to run out of customers there, making Cable Car Bottom (the yellow destination) not a bad choice either.

What If Something Goes Wrong?

No run is perfect; beyond the endless crashes, teleports, unwanted wall-sticks, and missed drop zones you’ll be subjected to over the time you spend practicing this game, sticking too close to any particular route will inevitably lead you to a position where you have no easy options out. When this happens, don’t panic, and pick up the nearest customer as soon as possible. The more time you spend without a customer trying to find one you’re comfortable with, the more seconds you’ll lose from your timer, whereas even a bad customer pull that takes you backwards will often rarely cost much in terms of overall time. You’ll keep gaining money on pace, and you’ll eventually work your way back onto the route. The more random customers you pull, the more you’ll learn their patterns from practice, eventually helping you break strict routing and start moving into the fluid routing that makes Crazy Taxi an inimitable experience.

After dropping at the Church, any yellows across the road will take you to Baseball Stadium, although getting them to spawn requires getting closer than you might think.

In the first half of the game, we skipped Church and Heliport. You may end up in these areas regardless. In the former case, I already mentioned the light green across the road towards the start of the hill area, but any yellow that spawns further up the hill across the first bend in the road is also a safe Baseball Stadium trip; much like the Levi’s drop zone check, make sure you pull to the edge when dropping off to ensure you spawn said customers. Heliport is nastier, but the sole green in this area (directly north of the drop zone) takes you across the highway, a very fortunate pull indeed (although his light green destination is backwards, his orange one takes you to Baseball Stadium).

In the second half of the game, we skipped Bus Terminal and Lookout Tower. For the former, I’ll introduce the “triad” pattern. For many groups of three customers throughout the game, they have similar destinations that are staggered between rotations. This usually manifests as one customer of the three being visually different while the other two are ambiguous; one will be forward and one will be backwards, and you will have to determine which is which by memorizing directional rules (clockwise or counter-clockwise).⁴ The orange-orange-yellow triad at the start of Bus Terminal is an excellent one to start with, because the forward orange customer will take you to Fire Station and save your route. This triad is a clockwise triad, and thus you should take the orange customer clockwise from the yellow customer. For Lookout Tower… this area has the highest knowledge floor in the game by far. Any yellow at the entrance of the area (before the drop zone, not past it) will take you to Tennis Court, which is a good start, although generally annoying to get to after dropping off a customer. Reds can take you to either Fire Station or Bus Terminal, so that’s generally my fallback (other than the red who occasionally spawns in the drop zone, that’s always backwards, so park close to the outside edge).

For this triad, the orange customer clockwise from the yellow one wants to go to Fire Station. In this case, it’s the orange customer on the left.

In general, if you’re comfortable with your time, take a longer distance random customer to try to maximize your earnings. If you’re nervous about your time, take a red to keep yourself afloat. If you’re running low on time and reach Downtown 1, consider grinding the highway for the rest of your remaining time. Once you’ve grinded highway enough, you’ll find yourself gaining back seconds even far into the game, potentially enabling you to push through a final loop once you’ve built up a bit of a buffer for yourself. You could also try sprinkling backwards highway trips throughout your loops, but don’t get in this habit if you can help it.

TL;DR

First Quarter: Take anything to go forward that you’re comfortable with.

Levi’s/Tower Records/KFC: Take anything light green or green. The yellow behind KFC is also safe.

R.B. Station/Baseball Stadium: Take anything light green or green, other than greens in the island patch near R.B. Station.

Downtown 1: Take anything orange or yellow.

Downtown 2: Take a light green from the scramble in the middle, or the light green from the entrance. If those fail, take the green from the cut-through near the scramble.

Fire Station: Take the light green in the drop zone or one of the ones on the far right side of the area. Otherwise, take a light green from either the left or right (not the middle) slope past the station.

I have a video companion for this route as well, which may be more helpful for you than this text guide.

Where Do I Go From Here?

For one, savor your first Crazy License! They aren’t super common for this game, as far as I can tell, even though the skill ceiling for this game far, far exceeds the threshold.

If you continue playing this route long-term, you’ll notice yourself running out of customers in key areas, especially Tower Records/KFC. In that case, it’ll be time to start striping your loops, or rather, trying to hit different destinations across every loop to avoid draining any one area of customers. This requires knowing destinations between multiple forward, good-quality customers and choosing ones that take you to destinations you haven’t been as much prior. At this point you’ll have to start building a mental library of all of the customers you’ve taken and the state of each area, letting it fill out over time and making decisions based on increasing the likelihood you’ll have something workable at any destination once you arrive. Of course, the more customers disappear across the entire map, the more likely it’ll be that you’ll struggle to find workable options, so you’ll have to continue building out your memorized customer database. Once I hit \$45,000 or so I had to take 12-hour breaks between my runs to let my mental map drain out, because I found myself getting confused in back-to-back attempts and misremembering who I had cleared out of each area.

Start watching top runners, if you can. Both Crazy Frank and dandandan5 have incredible scores that vastly outstrip anything I’m capable of; dandandan5 currently has a \$139,189 default settings record, while mine is at \$65,830.71. I would also recommend using dandandan5’s excellent customer spreadsheet, which lists with pain-staking accuracy all the customers in the game organized by destination set, which means you can start learning all of the tells for determining ambiguous customers. I would use crazytaxi.net’s location notes as a starting point, and cross-reference the tells explained here with the ones in the spreadsheet to make sure their accurate, since the destination set concept wasn’t understood at the point these location notes were written. However, many of the tells they explain are accurate, even if the probabilistic musings are now known to be inaccurate.

And most of all, keep practicing. Try Crazy Box to brush up on your movement (I’ll be real here, I’ve never beaten it! I always get bored lol I like the arcade mode too much), attempt one of the other categories, or play around on the Original map. When I’m actively grinding, I pick one particular part of the map to attempt to memorize new customers on so I can get a little stronger every time I play. You’ll struggle if you attempt to commit the entire spreadsheet to memory in one go, so determine your problem areas between runs in order to decide where you might need more options. Record yourself and watch yourself back to see where you’re losing time. Experiment with the different cars to get an idea of how the handling varies, especially between Gus and Gena, the two consensus best characters in the game. Even though it’ll seem grueling at the start, with long runs decimated by traffic collisions seemingly out of your control, you’ll learn to mitigate such eventualities and brush them off without letting them affect your play.

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