Earlier this month we learned that Sega’s big, secret “Super Game”, which has been under development for a while, was actually a series of “AAA games”. Bloomberg is now reporting that the first two of them are “big budget” Jet Set radio and Crazy taxi restarts.
Crazy taxi is reportedly a year under development, with the release still a few years away, and there are two more, unnamed games (one of them an FPS) under the same umbrella – Sega sees “Super Game” as a brand, not a single one project – work is also being done.
That Bloomberg report states that Sega is looking at Fortnite business model for both titles aimed at “developing recurring sources of revenue and building online communities”. Note this Sega has previously said that the “Super Game” project is a place where the company can experiment with NFTs.
Bizarrely enough, in the midst of all the news, there is also this disclaimer:
Both new games are in the early stages of creation and can still be canceled, people said.
Jet Set radiofirst released on Dreamcast and then recreated for Xbox and subsequently re-released on all sorts of more modern hardware, was an excellent game on an excellent console, with a synthesis of music, graffiti and ice 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, has certainly interesting timing; another team has since stepped into what they thought was a void to make Bomb Rush Cyberfunka game so close to what Jetset offered that it even has the original’s composer Hideki Naganuma.
Crazy taxi, meanwhile, life in the arcade began before it became one of Sega’s biggest games on Dreamcast (and beyond). In contrast to Jet Sets’ almost total radio silence over the last 20 years, but it has managed a number of sequels and spin-offs over the years, although it sounds like it could be the first proper race release since the PSP Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars.