Need for Speed Turns 30: The Lasting Legacy of EA’s Fastest Franchise

It’s December 1994. The Santa Clause, Miracle on 34th Street, Pulp Fiction, and Forrest Gump are duking it out at the global box office. Boyz II Men’s On Bended Knee is about to (temporarily) cede the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 to Here Comes the Hotstepper by lyrical gangster Ini Kamoze. In video games, the original PlayStation has just launched in Japan.

But forget the PlayStation for a moment, because December 1994 also marked the arrival of another interactive icon: The Need for Speed, on the ill-fated 3DO home game console. The 3DO, despite being lauded as Time Magazine’s 1993 Product of the Year, was ultimately a flop. There was no '3DO II'. The Need for Speed, however, was not a flop. There was a Need for Speed II. And III. And a fourth, fifth, sixth, and so on.

In fact, 30 years later the Need for Speed series is still with us.

And it’s become one of the best-selling game series of all time.

“Need for Speed is actually one of the most successful game franchises ever,” notes Criterion Senior Creative Director John Stanley. Stanley has been with Criterion for 14 years working across multiple EA series, from Battlefield to Battlefront, but his predominant focus is Need for Speed. “So it’s a very big honour and mantle to be lifted each time.”

15 years ago, sales figures for the franchise hit 100 million copies. A decade ago they’d rocketed past 150 million. Precisely what they sit at today is not known, but what’s clear is Need for Speed’s success and longevity make it a monster within the racing genre.

It certainly got off to a flying start. The original Need for Speed was an immediate critical hit, despite the 3DO’s own particular woes. Fortunately, subsequent ports to PC, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn would go on to make The Need for Speed a commercial smash as well.

Presented by Road & Track Magazine and developed by EA Canada, The Need for Speed’s 3DO debut boasted just eight cars – a modest mix of European exotics and 1990s sports icons from the US and Japan. It also featured a total of three tracks. Yes, that’s paltry by later standards, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this was entirely typical for the time – at least, until the original Gran Turismo arrived several years later with a garage pumped up to unprecedented proportions.

It’s also important to note that EA Canada had previously been known as Distinctive Software. Prior to its acquisition by EA in the early ’90s, Distinctive Software was responsible for the influential original Test Drive, its follow-up The Duel: Test Drive II, and cult, early 3D racing favourite Stunts (known as 4D Sports Driving in some regions). That high-speed experience was abundantly evident in The Need for Speed. Like the early Test Drive games that came before it, The Need for Speed asked players to dodge traffic as fast as they dared while outrunning the pursuing police. Electronic Gaming Monthly called it “the racing game to beat on the 3DO.” Edge Magazine declared it featured “the richest 3D environment ever seen on a home system.” GamePro was similarly full of praise, positing that “[i]f you dream of racing exotic sports cars, it doesn’t get any better than this incredible game.”

Of course, it did get better. Need for Speed built itself into a true racing juggernaut throughout the remainder of the ’90s, and it lapped Test Drive as the premier purveyor of playable police pursuits and illegal street racing. The series became the place to find the greatest exotics of the era: the Lamborghini Diablo and Ferrari 512TR. The Jaguar XJ220 and McLaren F1. Down in my own native Australia, the games were even localised with their own, regional-exclusive covers, and injected with the hottest homegrown sports sedans of the time. That was truly something, as a teenager; to be stalking a games store and see the sickest Australian cars on the street staring back at me from the shelves. That was unique to Need for Speed during this era.

But perhaps more than anything, Need for Speed carved itself out a reputation as a series that celebrated not just racing, but risk.

“I argue it’s the forerunner, or has been and still is the forerunner, in the only franchise really delivering on consequence,” says Stanley. “That thrill of the chase. I think nothing else out there in the racing game genre does that.”

By asking people to outrun police, and eventually even place their pink slips on the line, Need for Speed was a series that pushed its players to take risks. For clarity, by the time Need for Speed came around, we’d admittedly already faced the long arm of the law in 1987’s Test Drive, and many of us would’ve already lost rides to rivals after racing for slips in 1989’s Street Rod. But even if it wasn’t the first, Need for Speed was an extremely early adopter of these philosophies of risk – and it certainly became the most recognisable.

As the years went on, the property eventually found itself taking risks of its own. Firstly, with 2003’s radically reinvented Need for Speed: Underground, and then with 2005’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted – which is still the best selling game in the whole series.

“Oh man, they’re my beloved,” grins Justin Wiebe, who jokingly describes himself as the “old fossil” EA dug up for this chat. Currently Studio Design Director at Ripple Effect, Wiebe’s history with the Need for Speed series dates back to Hot Pursuit 2 in 2002.

“They’re like my crown jewels, to be honest with you,” he continues. “I’ve had a long career here and boy am I proud of having a chance to work on those games.”

On Underground, Wiebe explains the team didn’t quite know what they had on their hands at the time, but they were all hooked.

“It was so addictive to play,” he says. “It was the introduction of things like drag racing for the first time, where it was a completely new way of playing at high speed. And we were starting to explore other new, emerging racing genres – like drift racing and stuff like that – and starting to bring all of these new and cutting edge ideas, and then mixing in customisation. We were pioneering at that time.”

EA followed Underground with a direct, open-world sequel – the first open world in the series – but the bigger question was where to take it next.

“We kept asking ourselves, ‘Well, what do we do now? How do we one-up this? What are we gonna do?’” says Wiebe. “And we had an exceptional executive producer at that time, Mike [Mann], who came in and he basically said, ‘I want to make it the most elicit experience that we’ve done to date. I want to bring in the cops, and I want to make them feel so threatening, like they are the real world.’”

“So that was the mandate to me: take these cops and make everyone absolutely terrified of them.’ And I said, ‘Then, Mike, I gotta take away people’s cars that they earned; I’m gonna impound them, and they’re gonna lose them for a while.’ And he’s, like, ‘Do it.’

“[Need for Speed is] a franchise which is big, but it’s also unafraid to try to take risks. To do things differently. To challenge the norm. And that’s what I love about working on the franchise.”

In an entertaining twist, Wiebe even found himself in Need for Speed: Most Wanted as the racer Taz – number 14 on the Blacklist – after one of the actors failed to show up for a photoshoot.

“They started wandering around the office trying to see, like, ‘Who’s the most shifty-looking person we have here?’, and then they’re, like, ‘You!’” chuckles Wiebe, stabbing his finger in the air. “So yeah, they just grabbed me and did a couple of shots and there I am. It was a good time.”

According to Stanley, within the corridors of Criterion, Most Wanted remains a revered example of the series at the peak of its power.

“I cite Most Wanted so much within the studio,” he says. “Just around the way that it managed to weave together the narrative, the gameplay, the progression. Everything comes together in this.”

“A term that I use a lot, and now I’ll have to drink a shot for this: ludonarrative harmony. Because actually executing on that in a game? So important. And Most Wanted is a masterclass in that, and something that I definitely cite a lot.”

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It’s been almost two decades since Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and the series has continued to evolve.

“If you look at it, Need for Speed’s never remained the same,” says Criterion Producer Patrick Honnoraty, who’s worked on every Need for Speed since 2012 – from Criterion to Ghost and back to Criterion. “From one iteration to the next, it’s always had something that was different.”

“For good and for bad – because those things don’t always work and they don’t always resonate with players – but we guarantee that we’ll always be doing something different.”

“‘For good and for bad’ is a great example,” says Wiebe. “For example, my experience on creating Need for Speed: The Run. We really tried to break some new ground there. We talked about getting out of the car, and we had all these grandiose visions for how it was going to be more than just racing; the character’s going to get out of the car. But then we realised very quickly, ‘Well, we can’t really do that’, so we introduced some quicktime events.”

“Yeah, we all love quicktime events, right?” he adds with an ironic smile.

However, Wiebe believes they ultimately created “a grand racing adventure.”

“We wanted it to feel like your life is on the line,” he says. “That it’s more humanised than ever before about the character and the story that they’re in, racing from coast to coast. I’ll be the first to stand up and say that didn’t really work, but I’m proud of the fact that we tried it.”

“I was actually on a fan forum a few months ago and I actually was shocked at how highly-rated some of the fans actually made that game. I had thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit of a lump of coal in my resume.’ But it turns out that it actually has a massive cult following, and there are certain people that absolutely adore that game. And that brought a little joy to my heart; that we took a risk and there are some people that really found something to love about it.”

Honnoraty has noticed the same thing.

“I think every Need for Speed I’ve worked on, when it’s come out it’s been, ‘Oh my god, it was no good; it was rubbish,” he says. “People didn’t like it. And then years pass and it’s, like, ‘Ah, it was so good! It had these great elements to it. It was the best Need for Speed. Why don’t you go and make one back like that?’”

“Need for Speed is always too ahead of its time, is my thing. Every time we bring one out. Every time we bring one and it doesn’t strike, people look back on them so fondly.”

30 years on, building a Need for Speed game is an exponentially more complicated task than it ever was, and more challenging than ever. For Senior Vehicle Artist Frankie Yip the work required is significant, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The cars in Need for Speed are far more intricate now compared to the earlier days of the franchise,” explains Yip, who has worked on the franchise for the entirety of his 20-year career in the gaming industry. After picking up a copy of Need for Speed: Underground for PlayStation 2 as a teenager, Yip got so hooked he took a 3D modelling course and was soon living his dream, making cars for Need for Speed: Underground 2.

“I actually thought I was going to fail in the 3D school,” says Yip. “All the assignments? All I did was just model cars. And they’re, like, ‘That’s not part of the assignment.’ I don’t care; I like cars. So my portfolio was just all cars.”

According to Yip, dealing with the vast amount of content produced for each car is not as straightforward as it may seem.

“I’ll give you an example, just to break it down,” he begins. “Bodykits, for example. Say a car has three bodykit designs. That’s three front bumpers, three rear bumpers, three sideskirts, three front fenders, so on and so on. That tallies up to 15, 20 individual parts. But allowing the player to seamlessly and smoothly mix and match those parts? Yeah, it sounds simple, but it actually involves a significant amount of work. You run into issues; like, this part doesn’t fit with this. This part doesn’t fit with that.”

“There’s different variations in bumper widths, fender shapes, fender sizes; the list goes on. Panel lines, shut lines; nothing lines up. So, how do we make this all work? We actually have to build out every single part combination out there. You take that 15 to 20 individual parts I mentioned, and you multiply it to an additional 60, or well over a hundred. It depends on the car. Like, every car is a different shape. It is a ton of work, but what this does allow is it allows the player to have thousands of part combinations. And who doesn’t want that?

“So now you know why, in earlier Need for Speed titles, we just restricted the body kit to be equipped as one whole unit. But honestly, where’s the fun in that?”

For Criterion Vehicle Art Director Bryn Alban, there’s a bigger-picture challenge; that is, what defines Need for Speed to its massive and multi-generational audience.

“It means so much to so many people, and everybody’s got a different opinion as to what a good Need for Speed is,” says Alban, who’s been around since the days of Need for Speed: Shift and brings the experience of building his own Skylines over the past 20 years to his role on the franchise. “So trying to appease everybody at all times is super difficult. Even down to the nitty gritty details of what customisation we put on our cars; it’s so divisive a subject for our players that it’s almost impossible for us to get it a hundred percent right, all the time.”

“So when we do get things somewhat correct, it’s great. But when you see those comments where you’ve missed something, it really hurts. It hurts to your core. You’re, like, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot that we should’ve added that to the game.’ So, yeah, it’s really tricky and tough to get that balance of making the perfect Need for Speed, really.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve been missing Australian cars in the Need for Speed series since they stopped featuring back in the early 2000s, and Alban agrees it could be time for the series to circle back and include them again.

“Yeah, that’s a very valid point, and I think it’s true that Australian cars have been underrepresented in Need for Speed in its most recent history,” he says. “I can’t give you a reason why that is the case, but it’s definitely something that we should take a look at in the future moving forward, to see if we can redress that balance a little bit.”

“When you look at things like Holden, they’re very iconic within Australia,” adds Honnoraty. “They’re very interesting things; the utes that you have. So I think those are interesting examples for us to look at. And I’m sure, Bryn, you’d tell me there’s plenty of them in the drift scene as well?”

“Yeah, you see them crop up,” Alban responds with his finger clearly on the pulse. “I mean, just this last week there’s the Drift Matsuri that’s happening in Japan, and I saw that there were a couple of Ford Falcons over there in Japan doing their thing. So there’s definitely opportunities to tap into that, I think.”

It’s obvious Alban knows his cars. There’s also a fun synergy in the fact that the first Instagram video I’d watched of the very Falcons Alban is referencing features one cruising through a Tokyo tunnel to Get Low by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz. It should go without saying that anyone who played Need for Speed: Underground has that song seared into their synapses.

Need for Speed itelf has cruised both high and low over the last three decades but, while the team seems conscious that the series hasn’t always been at its best, there’s a clear feeling that it’s always remained faithful to being fun and approachable above all else.

“I think the trajectory has been bumpy, actually, in some cases,” admits Honnoraty. “But what’s happened – and I think what’s been most important – is if you think about the first inception of what The Need for Speed was, it was really accessible.”

“I remember going to what was probably the local video game shop, or computer shop, at the time, and me and my friends saw it on the 3DO. We were like, ‘What’s this?’ We all jumped on it, on the 3DO, and you felt badass. Being able to drive it, being chased by the cops; there wasn’t an experience that was really like it at the time.

“I think it’s really tried to stay true to that formula. It’s still accessible today; a lot of car racing games are not so easily accessible, so people still have the option to jump in and have fun with a Need for Speed game. It makes you feel like you’re just a bad-arse... It’s really inside of the DNA; it’s always there.

For Honnoraty, what makes handling Need for Speed tricky today are the side effects of how long the series has survived.

“I think today the biggest challenge we face is literally the age of the franchise, and what it's been,” Honnoraty continues. “It’s been so many different things and appeals to so many different people.”

“We even see the debates between players: which is the best game, and why is it the best game? You look at [Underground and Most Wanted]. The divisive debate that happens between which one of those is better and why – and how different they really are and what they were looking at – means that we sit in a place where Need for Speed means many different things to many different people.”

Honnoraty gives an example where, after speaking to attendees of the Need for Speed Payback booth at EA Play, some players compared the demo to Most Wanted, and others were adamant it reminded them of Underground.

“And I’m, like, ‘How? What? They’re completely different!’ he says. “So I think it’s just that people carry with them the feeling that they had when they played those games… I think that’s the hardest thing today; it’s honestly reconciling what Need of Speed means to players. And you’ve seen it; when we go in one direction with something that doesn’t quite work, and it doesn’t appeal to certain sorts of players. Or we go in another direction, so it’s a real thing that we have to tackle with, day in and day out. But John [Stanley] and I work with it constantly. We think we’ve nearly cracked it, so we’ll see.”

“Don’t forget the Porsche Unleashed crowd that would argue that that is the number one Need for Speed of all time!” adds Wiebe.

“Exactly! Exactly!” smiles Honnoraty. “We have a very vocal member in our player council that’s very vocal on Porsche Unleashed.”

“And then the Carbon crowd, the ProStreet crowd,” lists Stanley.

“The list goes on,” replies Honnoraty.

The list goes on indeed. So too, we hope, will Need for Speed.

To the window, to the wall, ‘til the sweat drop down… well, you get the idea.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.