‘It took over my life!’ How one man made his dream 90s video game on his own

‘It took over my life!’ How one man made his dream 90s video game on his own

Computer programmer Cassius John-Adams explains how he mashed up Crazy Taxi and The Fifth Element during an obsessive three-year period, single-handedly creating the game he’d always dreamed of

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.

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