Over lunch one day at work, Cassius John-Adams, a computer programmer for a Canadian TV network, was moaning to his co-workers that things aren’t as good as they used to be. “We got on to how everything, from video games to science-fiction films, was better in the late 90s and early 00s when we were all much younger,” explains the 45-year-old from his house in Toronto. Someone mentioned The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s wildly inventive 1997 sci-fi film. John-Adams brought up Crazy Taxi, Sega’s cartoonishly energetic driving game. And then, “I was like: ‘Man, I wish there was a mix between the two.’ Everyone around the table went, ‘Yeah, that would be the perfect mix.’”
It was the spark for one of the great passion projects in recent video-gaming history. Doing nearly all of the work himself, fitting it around his day job, John-Adams has made that very hybrid, a new game called Mile High Taxi that splices the vibe of Besson’s movie and the hurtling mayhem of Crazy Taxi into a heady compound of millennial nostalgia.
Sega released Crazy Taxi as a coin-op arcade game in 1999. Part driving and part stunt game, it had you racing around a free-roaming San Francisco-esque city, picking up and dropping off passengers while power-sliding, turbo-boosting and handbrake-turning to increase your fares and stay alive. It was ported to the Dreamcast in 2000 and immediately revered by the games press. In a five-star review, Arcade Magazine described it as “sheer adrenaline-pumping fun”, and I remember the review well because I wrote it. John-Adams was equally enchanted by the game. “I’ve always liked games you can pick up and play for 10, 20, 30 minutes and go about the rest of your day without getting too involved in a thick, plot-driven storyline,” he says.
Instead of driving around a 1999 San Francisco, in his game your taxi literally flies through a retro futuristic city of mile-high, Blade Runner-style skyscrapers, much like the one driven by Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element. Sega hasn’t licensed it, hence the name Mile High Taxi. “I’m just drawing inspiration; there’s no copyright laws around that,” says John-Adams.
In 2022, video games were worth nearly $200bn – more than the film, music and book businesses combined, and development and marketing teams for a big game – a Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty – can run into the hundreds or even thousands, while budgets reach $80m or higher. But John-Adams says he’s “definitely not the only person in the world who’s a solo video game developer. There’s a whole bunch of us. Most of us end up under the rug, shoved to the side by the larger indies and AAA video game studios.”
The idea of a one- or two-person computer game developer isn’t so strange when you think back to the first 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 undergraduates, David Braben and Ian Bell, for the BBC Micro in 1984. But with his full-time job as a Linux systems administrator for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, how did John-Adams find the time?
“It’s completely taken over my life,” he admits. “I’m on 38 months, so a little over three years. There’s been plenty of times I’ve pulled an all-nighter: finished work, gotten my six-year-old daughter into bed, worked until it’s time to wake her for school, and then put in a full day. I hope none of my co-workers got wind of that!”
John-Adams has been a self-confessed techie since his teens, cutting his teeth programming bits and bobs on the Tandy TRS-80 and Commodore 64. But he hadn’t made his own game before. “Nothing I would be confident talking about,” he grins. “This will be my first completed game. I’ve dabbled with Unity …” (These days, almost all commercial games are created using free, universal, cross-platform game engines such as Unity or Unreal.) “I’d started working at home due to the pandemic but needed to stretch my mind into some different areas of tech. I thought: ‘Why don’t I just give it a try?’ I assumed it would be a short, three-month project that wouldn’t go anywhere. But it was all about learning, and continuing to learn.”
One can imagine how to start painting a picture, writing a song or baking a cake. But how on earth do you begin writing a video game? John-Adams does his best to explain but his references to upscaling and aggregating code go over my head. 3D modelling, however, I can pretend to understand – it’s like computer Play-Doh, right? “It’s good to have something visually satisfying right from the get-go, to keep the motivation before I’ve got going with any real programming,” he says of his efforts.
Mile High Taxi was written on the regular Dell PC John-Adams uses for playing games. The only costs – a ballpark $10,000 – have come from paying the voice actors (“the one bit I just couldn’t do!”), licensing the music and buying in a couple of 3D models for around $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 video game marketplace Steam. Could it make John-Adams a millionaire? “I don’t want to say I’m a pessimist,” he laughs, “but I’m trying to be a realist. The discussion with a potential publisher has been that I could sell 10,000 copies pretty quickly, which would net me about $200,000.” And that’s without taking into account what Mile High Taxi could earn if it was ported to PS5, Xbox, Switch, Android and iPhone. “But I’ve no idea whether they were just blowing smoke up my ass,” he adds.
There have been big successes in the world of solo-developed games before, such as gladiatorial RPG We Who Are About to Die, by Belgian university lecturer Jordy Lakiere. John-Adams says he “wouldn’t be surprised if some solo-developed games have taken something to the tune of $10m. But we’re talking one or two solo developers in the world over the last five years that have done those kind of figures. And I don’t know any of them! I’ve always just been that nerdy teenager, up at night in the basement. I don’t think that’s ever going to change.”
• Mile High Taxi is released on 13 March on Steam.
