Crazy Taxi Tycoon and the Art of Selling Out

“Counter culture? Capital will commodify it, instigate it, reproduce it and sell it. There is no outside the loop.” — Monsieur Dupont

Back in the Dreamcast era, Crazy Taxi was a breakout hit. The Sega arcade racer captured the attention of generation X with a campy mix of fast-paced driving and light open-world elements, but once the series fizzled out, its name was relegated to the occasional re-release and mobile spin-off.

In 2017’s mobile spin-off Crazy Taxi Tycoon, also known as Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire, the series is reborn as an idle tycoon, or “clicker” game.

Tycoon navigates the role of the idle clicker game against newly progressive writing and characters for the series. Taking cues from the social justice politics of millenials, it cloaks the clicker genre in “woke” language that leans deliberately left. Still, the game’s writing and identity as a capitalist management game soon butt heads.

The original Crazy Taxi was a phenomenon in part by navigating youth culture, exaggerating the common cultural stereotype of the wild cab driver by allowing the player to ignore traffic laws, perform stunts and plow brazenly through people, vehicles and obstacles to the sneering punk of Bad Religion and The Offspring.

The game was emblematic of the commodified Generation X-geared rebellion of its time: raucous, nihilistic and commercial. The player-controlled fictional cabby would earn money until eventually their timer inevitably ran out, after which a letter ranking judged the player by how much money they made. The original title now stands as an iconic stand-in of its era, from its punkish characters to its use of licensed brands of the time like FILA, Pizza Hut and Tower Records.

While console games have spent the years since positioning themselves as premium, mature and masculine products, casual mobile games have become huge and accessible. In some ways, they’re the new arcade, opening games up to people who otherwise wouldn’t play them. The average video game player today is not a young man now, but a 43 year old woman.

Instead of valuing technical skill and violence, mobiles games are often built upon patience and automation, giving the player limited input in order to cultivate a space they can return to over time, like the backyard in Neko Atsume or the farm of Farmville. Players are incentivized to play daily with no threat of failure, and no endstate.

These titles are called Incremental Games, or “Clickers”. Distinct from the classic PC tycoon genre, which created more challenging, structured business scenarios, the Idle Clicker is a gamification of the great cultural myth of constant growth.

By divorcing the tycoon game of its main externalities and consequences of cost, these games become exercises in patience. Over time, all of the games’ goals achieve themselves.In order to speed these benchmarks up, the games incentivize either in-game purchases of artificial currencies and perks, or watching ads, often for other free-to-play idle games. The genre mixes menial “clicking” activities with clickable upgrades and expansions for the player’s assets.

These games tend to be about managing large corporations where all of the true labor is managed by a network of workers beneath the player. The job of the player is to let in profits and continue to expand the business. Clicker games are often interchangeably designed, and studios often reuse the same designs and code on separate games with separate licenses. Crazy Taxi Tycoon is in any ways just another one of them, yet it’s surprisingly subversive in its approach.

While Tycoon retains the original Crazy Taxi’s first four cabbies, it expands its offering quickly into a colorful new cast. Many of the new characters are clearly queer, and they range in race, orientation, body type and gender with a fluidity practically unprecedented in any game. These characters are not only diverse, but likable, with playful quips and puns that make them inherently unique and fun to unlock.

Melt, for example, is a fashionable trans woman who said she was deemed “too fluid” for the game’s villainous Prestige Corporation. Sage is a nonbinary person of color in Mad Max gear who decries “capitalism, the media and gender”. The well-coiffed Gretchen seems like a clear Janelle Monae analogue. What brings this cast together is a vague idea of marginalization. Unlike the player, these characters know struggle.

They aren’t cabbies who took to the position out of aimlessness, or to support rockstar lifestyles, like those of the original game. They’re gig economy strivers looking to get by.

“It’s so convenient being in walking distance of all your jobs.” cabbie Jackie says of one of the game’s areas.

Crazy Taxi Tycoon identifies that one of the biggest threats for marginalized communities is economics. The player’s “crazy” taxi corporation is a place for these diverse characters to sustain themselves in a world where. Despite their charisma, these characters are never given real power in your company. They can have their taxis upgraded through spent money, and in-game scratch lotto tickets can be used to unlock and improve their money earned per hour, all of which seemingly goes straight to the company’s [and player’s] pocket. In many ways, however, the relationship seem mutually beneficial. The cabbies and player are taking on the evil prestige corporation after all, who have “disrupted” the Taxi industry through automation.

This motivating factor turns out to be a lie, however. The Prestige Megacorporation is not the villain of the game. They are the main mechanic.

After the player company earns a set amount of money, Prestige CEO Von Gȕber makes the an offer. Telling the player that they can build a more “authentic” taxi company anew, the player is given the option to let go of their assets and cabbies, who they must slowly rehire. While the player starts the game anew in this case, a multiplier is then placed on all their earnings. As the player makes money post- sellout, they get the chance to do it again and again, with higher and higher multipliers.

While the player’s cabbies are defined by their spunky diversity, Von Gȕber is a monstrous tycoon. A Frankensteinian combination of a gilded age baron and a Silicon Valley CEO, he sports a light grey man-bun and beard, speaks emptily in buzzwords, and taunts the player for their choice of hiring human cabbies. Despite his awfulness, he becomes the player’s main interface with the world post-tutorial. For all its ethical caveats, selling out is all but required for the player’s continued interface with the game, and its attached cash multiplier is often the only practical way to make progress when upgrading cabbies and hiring new ones becomes prohibitively expensive.

It’s here that the game makes its central claim: that all rebellion will eventually be digested and integrated into the system, thus made benign. Your business may be diverse, but its project is not social uplift. It’s just business.

The sellout loop holds the game together. While the player starts making thousands, numbers soon move up into millions, then billions, trillions, quadrillions and quintillions. The money ticker in the game always adjusts, and the costs of upgrades scale alongside them. The result is a loop of spending and running low on money, with the charismatic cabbies the flavor keeping the game from becoming drudgery.

The eventual goal is to make “gazillions” after all, and in the process, Crazy Taxi Tycoon never really considers the employees who drive recklessly for the business. All of that stuff is just window dressing for the game’s real goal to extract time and money from the player. Real money can be used to purchase diamonds, which can also be earned by accomplishing in-game achievements and when upgrading and unlocking cabbies. Diamonds can be spent on in-game cash, increases to an additional multiplier that’s placed on your income, or used to get early access to scratch lotto tickets.

These lotto tickets seem to be engineered for maximum dopamine release. They can be scratched off with the touchscreen once every four hours, or eight if they are “S Class” licenses. A third, “Crazy” lotto ticket costs hundreds more diamonds than the others, suggesting the average player would have to spend money in order to get it. Lotto tickets generally yield massive amounts of cash, scaled to the player’s current income, as well as licenses for new cabbies and upgrades to hired cabbies. Every scratched ticket spot is a winner, and each ticket comes with a guaranteed minimum yield. These tickets can be hurried up by watching ads or spending diamonds. The player can also choose to simply purchase them with diamonds.

Players who don’t want to spend will watch ads. Every couple hours, the player is expected to watch one in order to keep their “crazy multiplier” up, and every scratch lotto ticket has a special space only openable to those who watch one. Other rewards also require watching ads. Every now and then, a blimp, balloon or helicopter will fly by on main screen. Tapping on them will pop them and offer a reward, like hours worth of in-game cash or diamonds. Often these rewards are also contingent on watching ads. Additionally, whenever the player loads the game, it will show how much money they made in the intervening time. If the player watches an ad, the game will double those earnings.

At the core of Crazy Taxi Tycoon, then, is a game that clouds itself in an anti-capitalist paint job, but ultimately is a neoliberal power fantasy of global capitalism, trapped in its license and genre. The Clicker is a deeply capitalist genre, and Tycoon can’t really deconstruct it. It has no win or lose state, just a point at which the player loses interest.

Instead, the game cultivates alienation. Von Gȕber’s dialog during the sellout sections seems tailored to prod the player. The boss glosses over sexual harassment charges, talks condescendingly about a life-changing trip to Africa and responds to a diversity initiative by saying he wants more “brothas” in the company. There is no comeuppance for him, no point at which the player’s company becomes too big for him to devour. The dream of usurping the powers that be always turns to defection. Still, the game continues to use him as a way to motivate the player to grow more powerful.

The plutocrat never loses his power, even when the player achieves everything the game has to offer, and yet the push notifications the game leaves still emphasize that the cabbies are counting on the player to bring them salvation. Of course it’s all a lie.

Some games are questioning the hyper-capitalist tycoon and clicker fantasies, like one upcoming indie about unionizing a potion factory, but being a laborer is generally something people play games to escape from. Tycoon can preach all it wants, but only in the same breath as it promotes absurd wealth cultivation. Whatever politics it claims to carry are blunted into a stalemate, just as the gameplay itself settles for its own monotony. Whatever commentary emerges comes in this contrast, the alienation that will slowly, inevitably, drive the player away.

There are two licensed songs in Crazy Taxi Tycoon, both by The Offspring. One, “All I Want” is a screed against repetitive American lifestyles, and a returning track from the arcade game. The other song, ”Change the World”, turns out to be more appropriate, describing hypocritical salesmen who claim to be philanthropists.

“You don’t want to change the world like you said.” it goes. “You’re in it for yourself. No one else.”

Matthew Koester is a writer, artist and journalist based in Illinois. You can read more of his writing at nomore.games and follow him on twitter @wusstunes.

Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Spring Quarterly has been funded by readers like you.