Hitmaker, the team behind games like Crazy Taxi, was at one point working on a survival horror game for the PS2 that was supposed to be Sega's answer to Resident Evil. That's according to a recent tweet from the Swiss Dreamcast researcher CombyLaurent.
CombyLaurent has put a ton of hours into researching Crazy Taxi in the past, documenting early prototypes of Crazy Taxi 1 & 2, and seems to have recently gotten in touch with someone familiar with the project who was able to reveal more.
According to CombyLaurent's source, the game was originally in development under the codename Project X, but eventually changed its name at some point to Carbondale in reference to a scouting trip the team took to Carbondale, Illinois. Apparently, photos of this trip exist, but they are private and cannot be shared — at least not without permission.
As CombyLaurent goes on to say, the game managed to get to the playable prototype stage before it was cancelled, which has us wondering if anything exists on some random hard drive that could eventually be recovered and shared.
Unfortunately, at the moment, no footage of the game has managed to make it online and there seems to be very little info about what the project actually looked like and the tone it was striving for — outside of the immediate comparisons to Resident Evil. So in the absence of any concrete facts, it seems we're sadly left to fill in the blanks ourselves, imagining what Hitmaker could have potentially brought to the horror genre.