Kamikaze Cabbie, known in Japan as Yellow Cab (イエローキャブ), is an action-adventure driving game developed by Data East and released in 1984 for arcades.
Building on the driving maze game format of Namco's Rally-X (1980), it is the earliest driving game in an open-world urban city environment (or a series of open environments). This makes it an ancestor of open-world driving games such as Grand Theft Auto (1997) and Crazy Taxi (1999).
Overview[]
Kamikaze Cabbie is a top-down maze action-adventure where the player controls a taxi. The main objective in each stage is to take a passenger and bring it to its destination, having to avoid traffic along the way. The player has a fuel meter which acts as both a lifebar and a timer, slowly decreasing over time and being depleted when the player crashes on other vehicles and buildings; in order to recharge it the player must stop at a gas station.