'Some of you may doubt that I'm actually working on this game.' In the room for an energetic Crazy Taxi demo...

June 11, 2026 - 12:44

Kenji Kanno looked around the room and asked a simple question. "Do you know Crazy Taxi?" He directed it at me and about a dozen other people sitting in a cramped basement room of a small building during the Los Angeles Summer Game Fest. Sega had rented the space to preview some of its upcoming titles.

Kanno is the original designer of the 1999 arcade classic Crazy Taxi, the game where you drive a bright yellow cab at high speed, picking up passengers and dropping them off with reckless abandon. That was the last thing he said in English. For the rest of the session, he spoke in Japanese, with a translator sitting to his right feeding his words back to us.

The group included other gaming reporters and a few content creators. When someone shouted "Oh yeah!" in response to his question, it set the tone. Kanno was clearly a high-energy guy, and he knew how to work a room.

Over the next half hour, I watched him deliver a lively demo of the new Crazy Taxi. But the presentation was about more than just the game. It carried subtle hints about ego and status in the world of game development and promotion. I learned plenty about the upcoming title, but by the end, I felt like I had learned something about Kenji Kanno himself.