Taxi Ranked hits 500,000 downloads and Vetkoek Studios is just getting started

Sho, Mzansi. Taxi Ranked, the mobile game that puts you in the driver’s seat of a minibus taxi, has passed 500,000 downloads on Google Play. For Joburg’s Vetkoek Studios, that’s half a million downloads of a game that feels unmistakably local.

Stop 01

Built for the phone in your pocket

Here’s the setup: you pick up passengers, work your route and climb the leaderboard, all from behind the wheel of a South African taxi. The Play Store listing invites you to take your Quantum out onto the streets of Mzansi, and that energy runs through the whole game.

1. Endless roadWeave through five lanes of traffic for as long as you can last.
2. Mini MzansiFree roam a small-scale South Africa with nods to places like Kruger and Cape Town.
3. Arcade shooting rangeA side mode for when you need a break from the road.
4. Garage and leaderboardsUnlock and customise new rides, a Golf GTI included, then flex your scores on your friends.

Going mobile-first was a deliberate call. Vetkoek Studios says most gamers in South Africa and across the continent play on their phones, so that’s exactly where an African game should live.

And here’s the part that matters most. South African culture isn’t background decoration in Taxi Ranked. The taxis, the humour and the roads are the game. Local players catch every reference instantly, while players elsewhere get a ride through a world mainstream games rarely show.

Stop 02

From Wits prototype to the real deal

The ride started at Wits University. Daily Maverick reports that co-founders Mamello Raboroko and Eric Gardiner were final-year students when they built a taxi game prototype with two classmates. That prototype won a competition hosted at the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct in 2022.

The win helped the team set up Vetkoek Studios and get the game into players’ hands. According to the studio, the crew kept the project moving at night while holding down day jobs, building the art, the code and the game systems after hours.

Half a million downloads for a game where the taxi rank is the main character. That’s Mzansi culture doing numbers.

Stop 03

Next stop: Création Africa

The milestone lands while Vetkoek Studios is in the final incubation phase of Création Africa 2, run by the French Institute of South Africa. Out of 340 applications, 15 ventures made the cut, and Vetkoek is in the Gaming and Interactive Media category.

Timing is everything. With the programme closing out this month, Vetkoek heads into its next chapter with 500,000 downloads to point to.

Stop 04

Where the route goes from here

Downloads get you noticed. The harder part comes next: keeping players coming back, growing revenue, reaching new markets and carrying this audience into the studio’s next games.

Speaking of which, Daily Maverick reports that Vetkoek has already released Aquabots and is working on a spinning motorsport game based on a South African TV series. Spinning fans, watch this space.

From where we sit at Cinga, there’s plenty of road left for Taxi Ranked too. Leaderboard challenges, community tournaments, creator collabs and live activations would all fit this game perfectly.

The bigger lesson for Mzansi’s game developers? You don’t have to sand off what makes you local to find an audience. Sometimes the local detail is the hook.