It was all astonishing at the time and frankly, every entry since has cowered in the shadow of its impact. There was an actual full 24-hour race on the Nürburgring. It had a career so dense that we’d wager less than 0.1 per cent of any who played the game will have got 100 per cent – I certainly didn’t. Over 700 cars from 80 manufacturers, spanning over 130 years of motoring’s past, present and future. Coming seven years after the original’s release, creator Kazunori Yamauchi’s reportedly infuriating fetishism for depth and detail culminated in a game utterly unrivalled and seemingly generations ahead in terms of graphics, physics, game content, car list and anything else that glues the very best driving games together.
Gran Turismo 4 is still in the eyes of many faithful to The Real Driving Simulator, the peak of the franchise. Then ProStreet had to try its hand at being a sim the same year Forza Motorsport 2 came out… More on Forza later… but oh dear oh dear. For four glorious years NFS stuck to what it was good at – a playful and at times even satirical celebration of different car cultures and honest-to-goodness arcade silliness. While the earlier games for the most part stuck to their lanes, Most Wanted and Carbon were fairly convincing amalgamations of the Gumball 3000 and Halfords car park rev-off polar opposite car cultures. Whatever your dream car, be it on the cover of Max Power or Evo Magazine, you could enjoy it in the environment it best suited on a Need for Speed game. Their reach spans everything from speeding across blazing hot deserts in a Porsche Carrera GT Concept in the supercar extravaganza Hot Pursuit series, to bolting neons onto a 1.1-litre Peugeot 106 in time for a top shelf rag photoshoot – thank you dearly for nurturing the inner chav of a generation, Underground and Underground 2. To pick one of these games would be to do the others a disservice, so 2002’s Hot Pursuit 2, 2003’s Underground, 2004’s Underground 2, 2005’s Most Wanted and 2006’s Carbon all get their fair mention. There are few car games however, that affected youth car culture, for better or worse, quite as profoundly as the Need for Speed franchise. Ask us to name a better driving simulator and I’ll name you ten.
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