Speedrunning Crazy Taxi with a live band is an inventive way to dodge a DMCA takedown

5 hours ago 2

Crazy Taxi with Live Backing Band by chuckles825 in 18:59 - Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 - YouTube

It was an unusually musical Awesome Games Done Quick this year, with an Elden Ring hitless boss showcase performed using an electric saxophone controller, followed by a Crazy Taxi speedrun with a live backing band.

The original soundtrack of Crazy Taxi by Bad Religion and The Offspring is an essential part of its appeal, but also a sure way to get a DMCA strike on your video of it. To get around that, runner chuckles825 performed this run with Limiter Cut, a backing band formed for the occasion. They played the songs to a thrilled audience, skipping to the next track when chuckles825 finished each level and restarting whatever song they were playing when he goofed and, for instance, drove an entire taxi-load of grandmas into the sea.

It's not the kind of speedrun you watch to learn about how various glitches and skips are performed—the all-romances speedrun of Fallout: New Vegas went a little deeper on that stuff. This one you watch for the entertainment value of recurring hard stops whenever a level's complete followed by the drummer doing that snippet of Change the World over the menu screen.

You can tell the song order was chosen to suit the level length, so don't worry, you'll get to hear a decent amount of Bad Religion's excellent Ten in 2010. (And less of The Offspring's not-so-great Way Down the Line.) While clearly a test of everyone involved's stamina, and the singer's vocal cords especially, it's a fun watch and I'd be happy to see them do something similar next year. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is the obvious choice, but consider: Trombone Champ.

This year AGDQ raised more than $2.5 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, pushing the event's lifetime fundraising total over $54 million.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.