![]() ![]() Elite was written by two Cambridge undergraduates, David Braben and Ian Bell, for the BBC Micro in 1984. Seventeen-year-old Matthew Smith wrote Manic Miner for the ZX Spectrum in 1983 in eight weeks. 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. Most of us end up under the rug, shoved to the side by the larger indies and AAA video game studios.” But John-Adams says he’s “definitely not the only person in the world who’s a solo video game developer. 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. ![]() “I’m just drawing inspiration there’s no copyright laws around that,” says John-Adams. Sega hasn’t licensed it, hence the name Mile High Taxi. 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. 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. It was the spark for one of the great passion projects in recent video-gaming history. 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.’” John-Adams brought up Crazy Taxi, Sega’s cartoonishly energetic driving game. Someone mentioned The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s wildly inventive 1997 sci-fi film. ![]() “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. O ver 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. ![]()
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