Earlier this month we learned that Sega’s big, secret “Super Game” that has been in development for a while was actually a series of “AAA games”. Bloomberg is now reporting that the first two of those are “big-budget” Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi reboots.
Crazy Taxi is reportedly a year into development, with its release still a few years away, and there are two further, unnamed games (one of them an FPS) under the same umbrella — Sega sees “Super Game” as a label, not a single project — being worked on as well.
The Bloomberg report states that Sega is looking at the Fortnite business model for both titles, aiming to “develop recurring revenue sources and build online communities”. Note here that Sega is on record previously as saying the “Super Game” project is a place the company may experiment with NFTs.
Bizarrely, amidst all the news, there’s also this disclaimer:
Both new games are in the early stages of creation and could still be cancelled, the people said.
Jet Set Radio, first released on the Dreamcast then remade for the Xbox and subsequently re-released on all kinds of more modern hardware, was a standout game on a standout console, featuring a synthesis of music, graffiti and skating that even 20 years later few (if any) games have been able to match.
The announcement of a new game in the series, long after fans had given up hope of ever seeing a new release, certainly has interesting timing; a different team has since stepped into what they thought was a void to make Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a game so close to what Jet Set offered that it even features the original’s composer Hideki Naganuma.
Crazy Taxi, meanwhile, began life in the arcade before becoming one of Sega’s biggest games on the Dreamcast (and beyond). Unlike Jet Sets’ near-total radio silence over the last 20 years, though, it has managed a number of sequels and spin-offs over the years, though this sounds like it could be the first proper racing release since the PSP’s Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars.
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