Over the weekend, a Crazy Taxi speedrunner performed with a live band at Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 as a creative to avoid copyright issues with the game's licensed music (h/t: VGC).
Crazy Taxi, as you may already know, is a game that debuted in the arcades back in 1999, before landing on the Sega Dreamcast back in the year 2000. It featured music from a bunch of popular punk bands, including Bad Religion and The Offspring, which has had the unfortunate side effect of making it somewhat challenging for the game to appear as part of live-streamed events like Awesome Games Done Quick, due to the risk of the music potentially being flagged for copyright issues.
As a result, the Crazy Taxi speedrunners Chuckles825 and 2dos came up with a rather ingenious solution to this problem prior to last year's Summer Games Done Quick as a way to orchestrate its return to the event.
This saw the pair submit a pitch for a run whereby 2dos and a group of other musicians (The Sound Defense, SquidDilla, and Metallama) would perform covers of the game's licensed music live, while Chuckles825 would complete a run as normal.
This turned out to be one of the standout runs of this year's event and marks the first time the Dreamcast game has appeared at AGDQ in roughly 10 years (though its sequel Crazy Taxi 2 was featured nine years ago at AGDQ 2016).
Writing on Reddit after the run, 2dos gave some info on how they initially came up with the idea, stating, "We had submitted Crazy Taxi several times over the years without success after our AGDQ 2015 run. We would have needed to mute the soundtrack if it did get in during those times for licensing reasons. I got the idea from watching CZR (the guy who did the SM64 drum run at the last AGDQ), and thought to myself 'We could do that'."
They were also asked whether they had any plans to do any similar runs for future events, to which 2dos responded, "Maybe, maybe not. There are similar runs that could be executed this way (Crazy Taxi 2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, etc) that could potentially be submitted by us. But I hope GDQ gets fresh ideas too. I really hope we inspired other folks to come up with unique submissions in the future!"
The Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) event is now over, having raised an incredible $2,556,305 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and providing hours upon hours of entertaining runs from some of the world's best speedrunners.
You can catch up with many of these runs on the Games Done Quick YouTube channel.