EITHERuring lunch one day at work, Cassius John-Adams, a computer programmer for a Canadian television network, was complaining to his coworkers that things are not as good as they used to be. “We realized that everything from video games to sci-fi movies was better in the late 90s and early 2000s, when we were all much younger,” explains the 45-year-old from his home in Toronto. . Someone mentioned The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s incredibly inventive 1997 sci-fi film. John-Adams mentioned Crazy Taxi, Sega’s high-energy cartoonish driving game. And then, “I was like, ‘Man, I wish there was a mix between the two.’ Everyone around the table said, ‘Yeah, that would be the perfect match.’
It was the spark for one of the most exciting projects in recent video game history. Doing almost all of the work himself, fitting it into his day job, John-Adams has made that very hybrid, a new game called Mile High Taxi that splices the vibe of Besson’s film and the fast-paced mayhem of Crazy Taxi into one heady composite. millennial nostalgia.
Sega released Crazy Taxi as a coin-operated arcade game in 1999. Part driving game, part stunts game, it had you racing through a San Francisco-style city, picking up and dropping off passengers while swiping and turbo-boosting. and handbrake spin to increase your rates and stay alive. It was ported to the Dreamcast in 2000 and immediately revered by the gaming press. In a five-star review, Arcade Magazine described it as “pure, adrenaline-pumping fun,” and I remember the review well because I wrote it. John-Adams was equally delighted with the game. “I’ve always liked games that you can pick up and play for 10, 20, 30 minutes and go the rest of the day without getting too involved in a dense, plot-driven plot,” he says.
Instead of driving around 1999 San Francisco, in this game your taxi literally flies through a retro-futuristic city of mile-high, Blade Runner-style skyscrapers, much like the one Bruce Willis drives in The Fifth Element. Sega has not licensed it, hence the name Mile High Taxi. “I’m just getting inspired; there are no copyright laws about it,” says John-Adams.
In 2022, video games were worth nearly $200 billion—more than the movie, music, and book businesses combined—and the development and marketing teams for a big game—Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty—can amount to hundreds or even thousands. while budgets reach $80 million or more. But John-Adams says that “he is definitely not the only person in the world who is a solo game developer. There are a lot of us. Most of us end up swept under the rug, pushed aside by the biggest AAA and independent game studios.”
The idea of a one or two person computer game developer isn’t all that strange when you think back to the early days of home computers. Seventeen-year-old Matthew Smith wrote Manic Miner for the ZX Spectrum in 1983 in eight weeks. Elite was written by two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, for BBC Micro in 1984. But with his full-time job as a Linux system administrator for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, how did John-Adams find the time?
“It has completely taken over my life,” he admits. “I’m 38 months old, so a little over three years old. There have been many times when I’ve stayed up all night: I finished work, put my six-year-old daughter to bed, worked until it was time to wake her up for school, and then went to work all day. . I hope none of my coworkers found out about that!”
John-Adams has been a self-confessed techie since his teens, cutting his teeth programming snippets on the Tandy TRS-80 and Commodore 64. But he’s never created his own game before. “Nothing I would feel safe talking about,” he smiles. “This will be my first full game. I’ve dabbled in Unity…” (These days, almost all commercial games are built using free, universal, cross-platform game engines like Unity or Unreal.) “I started working at home because of the pandemic, but I needed to broaden my mind in a few different areas of technology. I thought: ‘Why don’t I try it?’ I figured it would be a short three month project that would go nowhere. But it was about learning and keep learning.”
One can imagine how to start painting a picture, writing a song, or baking a cake. But how the heck do you start writing a video game? John-Adams does his best to explain, but his references to code extension and aggregation are glossed over. The 3D modeling, though, I can pretend to understand – it’s like a Play-Doh computer, right? “It’s nice to have something visually satisfying early on, to keep you motivated before you start any real programming,” he says of his efforts.
Mile High Taxi was written on the regular Dell PC that John-Adams uses to play the game. The only costs, about $10,000, come from paying the voice actors (“the only thing I couldn’t do!”), licensing the music, and buying a couple of 3D models for about $10 a time,” Just to save some time.”
It will finally be released in March and 20,000 people have added it to their wishlists on the Steam video game market. Could you make John-Adams a millionaire? “I don’t want to say I’m pessimistic,” he laughs, “but I try to be realistic. The discussion with a prospective publisher has been that he could sell 10,000 copies fairly quickly, which would bring me about $200,000.” And that’s without taking into account what Mile High Taxi could earn if it were ported to PS5, Xbox, Switch, Android and iPhone. “But I have no idea if they were blowing smoke out my ass,” he adds.
There have been big hits in the world of solo games before, like the gladiatorial RPG We Who Are About to Die by Belgian university professor Jordy Lakiere. John-Adams says that “you wouldn’t be surprised if some solo-developed games have collected something to the tune of $10 million. But we’re talking about one or two solo developers in the world in the last five years that have done those kinds of numbers. And I don’t know any of them! I’ve always been that nerdy teenager, up at night in the basement. I don’t think that’s ever going to change.”
