Tim Walz’s Dreamcast obsession has been immortalized in a Crazy Taxi mod

By Carli Velocci Published September 13, 2024

Since vice presidential candidate Tim Walz revealed himself to be a gamer, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to run with it inside a video game. That’s why when we spotted Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition, a Dreamcast mod on itch.io this week, we knew we had to write about it.

In case you don’t get the joke here, it started with an anecdote by Walz, published in the New York Times, about how he was a big fan of the Sega Dreamcast, but his wife, Gwen Walz, had “seized” it because he was using it too much. Many video game fans were, of course, curious for more details. What happened to the Dreamcast? What games did Walz play? What was the game that supposedly pushed Gwen over the edge?

That’s when a ResetEra thread from 2018 resurfaced, where user Bryn “Aaron” Tanner (identified by IGN) said that he had the former Minnesota governor’s Dreamcast. When asked to explain that story, Tanner said that he bought it for $25 from one of Walz’s former high school students, who received it from Walz while he was working for the congressional campaign.

The console didn’t come with any games, but IGN’s Rebekah Valentine investigated, and this former student was identified as Tom Johnson. He took the Dreamcast with him to college, and recalls that there was one disc sitting inside the console: Crazy Taxi. Thus a meme was born.

Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition is a mod for Crazy Taxi that can only be run inside the Flycast Dreamcast Emulator. You play as a taxi driver (Tim Walz), who drives around town picking up passengers and transporting them to their destination. The twist is that you’re, you know, a crazy taxi driver, and have to get them to their destinations as quickly as possible. You’ll pull stunts, and crash into a ton of pedestrians on your journey.

In an interview with MPRNews, the game’s developer Edward La Barbera said he learned how to make Dreamcast mods specifically because of this whole Walz saga, and thought it would be “a funny homage, like Bill Clinton in the arcade game NBA Jam.”

Beyond just getting Walz into the game, La Barbera also added some Minnesota touches, including snowy weather, trees more indigenous to the northern Midwest, and flannel. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is even a selectable character, and both her’s and Walz’s Democratic National Convention speeches are in the game as the voiced lines. There’s even a new destination type: a polling location.

It’s not super weird that Walz might be a Crazy Taxi fan — we listed it as one of the best Dreamcast games of all time. Sega announced last year that it was developing projects in five classic franchises, including Crazy Taxi. Basically, there’s always room for more Crazy Taxi.