Summer of 2021 was when the arcade near me obtained a stand up version of Crazy Taxi, and it was one of the games where I thought it would be fun to get good at. I decided to learn a lot of the more intricate techniques needed to perform well, and looking back, I was playing pretty inadequately at the time.

I obtained the Crazy License, which is a threshold of $20,000. This was August of 2021, and I knew I had higher standards to obtain with regards to my scoring.

In due time, some promising prospective players would rise up and challenge me for my crown as a tenacious taxi driver, and I soon witnessed the driver known as “AWM.” He had beaten my fresh record, which had motivated me to beat his record, and I felt like I was on top of the world because the gap in score was greater than his attempt at my previous best.

This was late September of 2021, and I thought I had healthy competition. Boy howdy was I wrong. When November came, this guy had beaten my $31k with a whopping $47k (sorry, no picture on record, so just take my word for it,) and I was floored like the gas pedal. I tried for several weeks but I couldn’t even get near that record, and for a while I thought it was a lost cause.

By January, the scores had reset due to the CMOS battery inside the machine dying out, but I still had business to take care of. Still attempting to beat that $47k, only to be met with barely $35k. I started wondering if it was even worth the effort, and I started making the meme excuse that he used Gus.

For reference, the drivers in Crazy Taxi have different properties that affect gameplay, but going into detail is a bit out of scope for this entry. I’ll just focus on the most important detail — Gus (pictured on the bottom) has a very thin vehicle, while B.D Joe (pictured on the top) has the largest out of all the drivers. This means that it’s easier for Gus to weave through traffic and rack up tips for risky maneuvers.

So why not use Gus myself? Well I’ve always had this sort of “gung-ho” attitude about many things I do in life. I would tell myself that I wouldn’t play his (AWM’s) game and do things on my own terms. I was essentially handicapping myself by doing this but if I succeeded, I could always use the excuse that if I were beaten again, it would only be legit if they used Joe as well. By this time I had purchased the Steam version of Crazy Taxi (the port is shit btw, even if you mod it to restore the music it still is prone to crashing) and set myself out to learn the game seriously. Unfortunately, I had somewhat lost interest in doing this around the time of Spring 2022, and I would not “feel it” until November of the same year.

I started getting better. My decision making, endurance, and mechanical ability were all improving at an alarming rate. I hit a snag on my first attempt (pictured on the left,) but I knew it was coming. Literally the day after, I had blown that $47k out of the water (pictured on the right.) I was super ecstatic, and I am glad I took a picture, because the CMOS batter was still dead since last year.

I was pulling off insane feats with this game like you wouldn’t fucking believe. It had become a recurring joke that “You don’t join the leaderboard for Crazy Taxi. You join ‘Aaron place.'” I started setting crazier (ha) goals for myself like getting the timer as high as I could, and I would go to other arcades and dominate their leaderboards as well assuming their CMOS batteries weren’t dead.

To this day I still have not seen AWM return or even rank in my home arcade, so there is a bit of a bittersweet feeling there. There’s no one who can challenge me, so I would end up challenging myself. I broke my own record using a different cabbie, and made it seem like it was someone completely different. I ended up beating THAT record by a measly amount as if I were flexing on myself.

My greatest goal now is to hit the fabled $100k, and I can see that happening very soon. I just need to play a bit more patiently and focus on earning tips and driving in a calculated manner. My playstyle involves me going crazy (ha) with speed and seeing how much time I can gain.

It was a little over a year in the making, but to whoever AWM is, gg.