To Circumvent Licensing Issues, Crazy Taxi Speedrun Has Live Band Playing Music

At Awesome Games Done Quick 2025, the live event where speedrunners complete games quickly to raise money for charity saw the return of Crazy Taxi.

Sega’s arcade game is much loved for its fun driving physics as well as its infectious soundtrack. But like most racing games and driving games, Crazy Taxi uses licensed songs. A racing game where the soundtrack is muted (Crazy Taxi is a game from before Streamer Mode exists) robs a lot of the fun associated with it.

Especially Crazy Taxi, where cultural touchstone is the “Ya Ya Ya Ya Ya” The Offspring frontman Dexter Holland wails out as the starting verse of the song All I Want.

According to speedrunner 2dos, Crazy Taxi has been denied entry from Games Done Quick events for years due to licensed music. And as such, made an ingenious submission for a speedrun of Crazy Taxi while still have the iconic four punk-rock songs heard live on stream. They just play the songs live.

The submission video showed the concept is one entertaining show. The speedun is performed by chuckles825 while 2dos heads up a live band as the guitarist alongside Metallama (vocals), SquidDilla (bass) and TheSoundDefense (drums).

The live band isn’t just performing the songs from Crazy Taxi, but performing as if it was heard from the game, which means the songs just cuts off if the game pauses and heads back to the menu. And this is a speedrun, there’s a lot of that starts-and-stops that makes the performance even more lively.

The speedrun was accepted and performed live at AGDQ 2025 in front, well, back, of a live audience. The first time in 10 years. And it became a live concert.

Usual live speedruns will see the runners sharing their tricks on how they exploit a glitch or perform a skip. But not this Crazy Taxi run. It was a proper rock concert, mosh pit and all.

There were smart adjustments made to the live run, including intermissions where the performers get to take a quick respite (singing All I Want and Way Down The Line by The Offspring, as well as Ten in 2010 and Them And Us by Bad Religion in fits and starts is not easy). Though the drummer still does the drum loop as heard in Crazy Taxi’s menus.

The 19-minute run, intermissions included, see chuckles825 completing the Crazy Box mini-games in Crazy Taxi. It’s no perfect run, one restart happened and the live band was definitely caught off-guard by this. The final level see two songs played entirely in full before the run is timed.

but the fact that potential copyright issues that plagued racing games resulted in a concert performed at a speedrunning event shows what the gaming community can create.

With this performance, it opens the gate whether other games featuring licensed music can be speedrunned in this matter at live events.

Due to the reliance of licensing, racing and driving games usually face problems like this. Many games have now been delisted, including the entire Forza franchise outside of the currently supported Forza Motorsport (2020) and Forza Horizon 5. The outrage of The Crew getting delisted has caused a movement to ensure purchased games don’t just die due to servers closing down.

Sega announced back in 2023, they are working on making new entries for many game series currently dormant, including a new Crazy Taxi game.

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