Author’s note: This interview was originally published on Substack, and duplicated here.

When I sit down with Bryan Burton-Lewis to discuss how he became the unmistakable voice of a green-haired, eclectic – almost bombastic – video game taxi driver, it strikes me that it’s probably not the part of his career he expected to follow him across the globe.

Bryan spent the ‘90s in Japan, where he was born and raised, translating for the biggest rock bands on earth as they passed through Tokyo. Nirvana, Beastie Boys, Metallica, and Sonic Youth are just a few names he casually slips into conversation.

The job that kept coming back

He fondly recalls the day he was invited into Sega’s downtown Tokyo office, into a room where the company kept a majestic showcase of its arcade machines. By then, he was already a household fixture of Japanese national television and radio, hosting close to ten shows a week and being on air most days. Still, there was something different about sticking a credit into a Crazy Taxi machine and hearing his voice erupt for the first time.

“Out of all the work I’ve done in the past, this would be the one that sticks out”

“I punched the credit button and played,” he recalls. “Alright, let’s go make some craaaazy money,” booms the game. “I was thrilled. That was awesome, and the game played so well. It was the music that I loved, and it was my voice.”

“I remember that day at the Sega office. I was there for a meeting or something, but they couldn’t get me to go upstairs for several hours,” he chirps, grinning as he recounts the first time he got to play one of the most famous arcade titles in history.

As we walk through Bryan’s sprawling career, it’s almost strange to watch someone light up over a role that, on paper, is very much one of the smaller entries on his résumé. Yet, out of everything he’s done: founding Japan’s largest rock festival, spearheading live broadcasts, directing dialogue and acting in acclaimed Japanese film Swallowtail Butterfly – thirty years living and breathing rock and roll – this is the one that keeps finding him.

“Out of all the work I’ve done in the past, this would be the one that sticks out. It’s consistently popping up in my life,” he tells me.

It’s also one, he admits, that he’s barely spoken about publicly.

“Personally, I think this is the first ever interview I’ve actually done about Crazy Taxi,” states Bryan.

Before Crazy Taxi came Nirvana, Beastie Boys, and a hospital-ward guitar

The more we talk, and the deeper we dive, it becomes clear to me that the iconic voice work in Crazy Taxi wasn’t just a happy accident; it was the culmination of his career efforts to date.

He had years of experience working as a translator with the world’s most famous artists. He was a natural broadcasting talent and boasted deep knowledge of how to bring the biggest names in the Western alternative music scene to a localised Japanese audience. These all went into not just voicing Axel, but helping script the entire game and shaping how each character sounded.

To paint the picture as to why Sega trusted him with so much creative input, we go back to Tokyo in 1990: a hospital ward, a guitar, and a 19-year-old who couldn’t yet write his own English lyrics.

“Life for me really started in 1990. That’s when I joined the music business,” Bryan explains. He’d been hospitalised in high school, and on that same floor was a 19-year-old named Keigo Oyamada. They became close friends on the ward, with Oyamada playing guitar (really well, by Burton-Lewis’s own admission) between treatments.

A young Burton-Lewis and Keigo Oyamada. Image: Bryan Burton-Lewis

“He was teaching me guitar, but the demo tape that he played me was just this horrible Japanese English that no one could understand,” he recalls. “It was Brit Pop, so I told him that I could help him write his lyrics and pronounce his English if he would teach me guitar. So that was my first contract in the music industry.”

It’s a fairytale story that becomes even stranger when contextualised. Oyamada later founded Flipper’s Guitar before reinventing himself as Cornelius. Under Cornelius, he was celebrated internationally as a “modern-day Brian Wilson” or the “Japanese Beck,” and Burton-Lewis is credited on Cornelius’ album 69/96 as a co-writer of the lyrics, and he tells me he wrote the majority of the guitar music for the album, too.

Once he had a foothold in the music industry, his client list started to balloon. He became the go-to man for all Japanese music media whenever a foreign band came through the Japanese capital. In the alternative explosion of the early ‘90s, this was far from rare.

“I was the interpreter for Nirvana,” he says. “I worked with the Beastie Boys for 30 years. I was working with bands like Sonic Youth.” He continues, nonchalantly reeling off names like Metallica, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Slipknot, and more. Bryan had become the middleman for bringing Western bands to Japanese audiences.

Bryan Burton-Lewis and Slipknot (Clown, coincidentally, loves Minecraft) Image: Bryan Burton-Lewis

His reputation wasn’t going unnoticed. The producers with Burton-Lewis on speed dial started to pose a different question.

“They were like, maybe you should give being a broadcaster a try,” he recalls. “You seem to get along with these artists. You’re really good at translating. How about if you have a shot at doing your own shows?”

He said yes. In his pomp, Bryan was a familiar face on air almost every day, and a voice synonymous with Japan’s alternative music scene.

Bryan was part of Crazy Taxi’s DNA before he was even cast

Crazy Taxi’s series director, Kenji Kanno, has openly talked about finding the right sound for the game. He told Game Informer he spent a day wandering Tokyo’s Tower Records, listening to swathes of music before settling, eventually, on The Offspring’s “All I Want”, the song whose “YA YA YA YA YA” has become as synonymous with Crazy Taxi as Bryan’s own “let’s go make some craaaazy money.”

“I listened to a bunch of songs, like, all day,” Kanno said of that search. The choice was not quite the bolt from the blue it might seem. Sega’s producers had long been getting their alternative-music education from the man who would eventually become Axel.

Megalomaniacs, his 90-minute live broadcast, was where Japanese audiences would get their weekly dose of whatever alternative band was up and coming in the global scene, with Burton-Lewis mentioning Green Day, The Offspring and NOFX to name but a few.

“They kind of credited a big influence from my show,” Bryan says, “for choosing the music for the game.”

At this point, the jigsaw pieces start to fall into place. It becomes easy to see why and how Bryan ended up involved in a project that would go on to become a truly global success. Crazy Taxi was a natural extension of everything Burton-Lewis had been doing for the past decade.

More than just the voice of Axel

When you look up Crazy Taxi or Bryan Burton-Lewis, there’s very little public information about what exactly his role was. It transpires that it was significantly more than just playing a crazed cabbie.

“When I first stepped into the game, they had this idea about syncing, and getting publishing rights for some of the bands that I was close friends with, and also playing on my shows,” Bryan says. “So I was able to kind of help them with that process a little bit – guide them in the ways of getting licensed, because I had some publishing experience as well.”

“It was very natural. It was kind of very me at the time. And yeah, it was a lot of fun.”

My preconception of a voice actor’s work (and perhaps the norm) is that someone comes in once a game is finished, utters a few sweet nothings into a microphone from a script already written, before it is edited and shipped. That’s not what happened here; Bryan was involved far earlier in Crazy Taxi’s development cycle.

“I got quite involved with the game early on,” he says, “when they were still in their final development stage. They asked me if I would do the characters.”

When it came to the wider cast of Crazy Taxi, Bryan reveals that “the actual cast for the other characters was pretty much my friends.” He continues, “I chose friends and asked them to do the voice of other ones, and had the opportunity to get involved with the scripting for some of that work.”

The gruff tones of Axel weren’t new to him either. He’d spent years voicing similarly scratchy, high-energy characters on albums by Japanese punk acts like High Standard and Mad Capsule Markets, and that was the vibe that Sega wanted for Axel.

“The producers were very much into me kind of playing the role that I would do as a voice actor character in other work,” he tells me.

By the time the recording for Crazy Taxi took place, it wasn’t so much another script and another voice-over job, but more transferring his unique personality to a character he’d helped build.

“It was very natural,” he says. “It was kind of very me at the time. And yeah, it was a lot of fun.”

“It was kind of very me at the time.” Image: Bryan Burton-Lewis

Burton-Lewis didn’t just enter the recording booth to voice Axel, but he’s the narrator, or system voice, which delivers the game’s most famous line. Axel’s the more friendly, “hop on in” that greets every wacky fare, whereas the system voice feeds the frenzy you feel as you fly through the air in Sega’s San Francisco-inspired backdrop.

“The narrator’s voice was, I think, much more distorted in a sense. It was like ‘let’s make some crazy money,’” he says, “whereas Axel’s it’d be like ‘hey hop on in’, so it was a cleaner tone to a more squashed tone.”

“We recorded the husky voice first, and I actually blew my voice out on the first day,” he laughs. “We had to do all the crazy voice material in one day, then let my voice recover before doing the other one.”

I pondered whether the script was set in stone or if there was creative license and room for improvisation. It turns out even the game’s signature catchphrase wasn’t quite scripted.

“Let’s go make some craaaazy money” was basically an improvisation

“The script might have said ‘make some crazy money,’ so I’d go ahead and say it, and they’re like, ‘can we get a little more?’” he smiles. “And as we would improvise it, it would end up being ‘let’s go make some craaaazy money.’ So that kind of improvisation was definitely there.”

The freedom extended beyond the game’s catchphrase, and the recording sessions were anything but brief.

“These narrations were long, hard processes,” Bryan recalls. “I think the Sega Darts Live narration I did probably had over a thousand lines, and took three days to record. The Crazy Taxi one, they did my character first – to kind of get the groove, get the vibe, test things out – and then brought the other narrators in. I sat in with one or two of the other narrations and then helped them improvise on the scene as well.”

“And as we would improvise it, it would end up being ‘let’s go make some craaaazy money”

Not all of the improvisation made it past the compliance team, however.

“I don’t know if I was allowed to say the f word, but it sounded good,” he laughs. “I think there may have been some compliance issues in there. But yeah, I think we probably get away with more in these modern times with some of the more recent games I did – they pushed the limit on compliance pretty hard.”

The Crazy Taxi soundtrack could have been oh so different

Back in 1999, when Crazy Taxi was released, getting music into video games wasn’t common practice. Both bands and game publishers were still figuring out what game placement was even worth, and plenty of bands said no before the list was finalised.

“There was quite a bit on the list that they attempted, and just got shut down,” Bryan explains. “Some of those they pursued harder, which I think would be representative of Bad Religion and Offspring. And these bands did give them the okay. I do remember at the time that the bands were also really thrilled with the outcome.”

Beastie Boys ft. Axel Image: Bryan Burton-Lewis

Often, execs made the decisions without the band’s input themselves. “The more major side of things – for example, if they had Red Hot Chilli Peppers on there – these types of bands were the quick ones to shut down,” he says. “I don’t think it ever became a band decision or anything, I think it was strictly a publishing issue.”

It’s hard to imagine Crazy Taxi without the game-defining music, but it could have been ever-so-different.

Bryan tells me that artist rights, performance rights, and royalties were all still being figured out. He reflects, “I do remember that more major publishing companies and major bands on the list turned them down for one reason or another, which actually resulted in a more indie feel, and a more punk feel. And I think that kind of made the real late-’90s sound, and really kind of defined it. It may have come out better in the end, to be honest.”

Crazy Taxi was released in 1999 with an array of licensed music, more than two years before GTA III arrived with its own soundtrack, and well before the series became known for the wall-to-wall licensed radio stations of Vice City and San Andreas. But Burton-Lewis believes that Sega’s title helped create a ripple effect across the industry.

“I think future games like Grand Theft Auto, or whatnot, with the fun radio selections, and the BGM selections – I think there was a lot of kind of prototype work that Crazy Taxi did to help pave those roads,” he says.

“This has been so iconic, and i’ve enjoyed it this long, that it wasn’t something I chased financially.”

Given Crazy Taxi’s longevity, I’m intrigued to know whether its voice cast ever shared meaningfully in the spoils of its success.

He explains the financials using a Coke commercial, rather than the game itself. “These commercials would basically work on cycles,” he says. “I would get $3,000 for a Coke commercial that’s going to run for three months. And if that commercial were to be extended by another three months, they’d offer a reduced extension fee – maybe $2,000 for the next extension, then $500, and so on. But I never really expected that with a video game.”

With hindsight, perhaps he should have. Crazy Taxi followed an almost identical pattern, stretching out over years rather than months, as the game kept being sold into new markets and platforms.

“My agents called me and told me Sega wanted to license this to America,” he tells me. “There was some sort of extension when this thing got global, and then it left Sega’s hands for a minute when they sold the rights to another platform – there was another payment. But as it kept getting extended, the money got smaller and smaller. So when they’re chasing me down to pay me $250 for an extension, I think we probably lost track of interest at some point.”

It’s not an unfamiliar story arc to other voice actors and old-school licensing deals. Where work outlives its original paycheck by decades, the artists rarely see anything close to the game’s eventual scale. I recall a famous example from an interview with Tim Kitzrow, of “boomshakalaka” NBA Jam fame, where he revealed he made $800 for a game that grossed over $1 billion.

Bryan, however, seems entirely at peace with it and explains that the joy the game has given him outweighs the monetary benefit. “Some licensor in America tracked me down for the usage of that voice,” he says. “They asked me how much I would want? And I didn’t even take any money for it. I just said go ahead and do it. This has been so iconic, and I’ve enjoyed it this long, that it wasn’t really something I chased financially.”

Nearly three decades later, Axel came calling again

A week before we sat down to chat, and nearly three decades after he first recorded Axel, Bryan got back in the booth – in character. It wasn’t, however, on an invitation by Sega, but by a small team of American game developers who grew up living and breathing Crazy Taxi.

“I recently did a couple of voice jobs. These were by some young American developers who were inspired by early Crazy Taxi, and they reached out to me, like you did, and asked me if I was interested in doing some work,” he grins. “So I did do one game, that was a revisit of Axel in 2026.”

“It would have been so easy for those young game creators that I worked with last week just to run that old Axel and come up with a 2026 version. I find it cool they hunted me down and got me, thirty years later. AI can’t do that.”

Burton-Lewis has been lending Axel’s voice to other things. He recently voiced the version 2.5 update of Speak DLC, a sound mod for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

“You can choose the actual character, and that’ll be featured with my voice that I recorded last week,” he beams, sounding excited by the prospect. “So that was really fun, kind of revisiting that same old ‘jump on in’, as you say. It brings back a vivid memory.”

In 2026, with the discourse around AI, those developers could have attempted to imitate Axel without calling Burton-Lewis at all.

“It would have been so easy for those young game creators that I worked with last week just to run that old Axel and come up with a 2026 version,” he says. “I find it cool they hunted me down and got me, thirty years later. AI can’t do that. There’s going to be some differences in that voice, but there’s also going to be distinctions. People who hear that narration are going to know it’s me.”

“But I don’t really care,” he continues. Bryan’s not someone who abhors the use of AI, and he points to the music industry, where he’s seen AI used for promoting the rave scene. “There is push back – I always hear people say ‘that flyer looks like it’s AI’ and whatnot. My personal opinion is that it looks cool. So I’m not really opposed to AI, to be honest.”

That’s not to diminish the intrinsic value of human input, as he elaborates, “I do think there is the merit of analogue input, and as long as there’s an interest in that, and anybody wants to do something, I’m totally up for it.”

He’s also been busy, recording the system narrator and the snowboard character for the upcoming release Radical Zomboarding, a roguelike snowboarding game that encourages gamers to “soak the slopes with blood.”

There’s just one call he hasn’t had

The part I find odd is that there’s a small group of game developers who have gone out of their way to track him down for a passion project. But Sega, the company actually building Crazy Taxi: World Tour, with Axel front and centre in the trailers, hasn’t (yet).

“I know a lot of the control of Crazy Taxi was based overseas, not in Japan. And I was very much in Japan,” he says. “I lived in Japan for 53 years, after being born there, until last year, when I relocated to America. So, no contact with them. It would be great.”

There’s not a hint of bitterness coming from