My King Is Dead.

The original king of racing games has become a tired old man. I found the new blood to replace him.

My family has owned a personal computer for as long as I can remember. Almost every video game I played was from a single Sunsoft shareware disc. Skunny Kart and Fighter Pilot were among a wide selection of game demos that took up my free time on the PC. Since my dad’s Super Nintendo was my primary source for video games however, there was only one computer game I truly owned.

That game was Need for Speed II.

Before long, I was playing nothing but racing games, and if I had no access to video games I’d play pretend. When I was alone in my room I often took my Hot Wheels cars and played on the floor with my Big City carpet. When I was stuck in the car for a road trip with my parents I’d bring my toy cars with me and pretend I was racing on my favorite tracks from NFS II. If I didn’t have access to the computer I played Top Gear on the SNES. I was inseparable from the idea of driving cars quickly and dangerously.

I grew up with the Need for Speed franchise, though. I bought NFS III: Hot Pursuit about half a year after it was released because I had no idea another game was made. Just before I started getting bored of that, my parents purchased a Nintendo 64. For a while I was satisfied renting games like Hot Wheels Turbo Racing or Top Gear Overdrive then buying them outright if I liked them enough. I bought Porsche Unleashed, then Hot Pursuit 2 with my allowance money when they came out, too.

Underground, however completely changed everything for me.

In NFS: U, I was a simple low-level street racer in a crappy mid-90's beater trying to win the pink slips to the legendary Japanese tuners my opponents drove. The Nissan Skyline easily found exposure in kiddie gearheads like me, and before long my bedroom wall was filled with posters of JDM tuner cars. The idea that I could take a crappy second-hand shitbox and turn it into a roided-out tire shredding machine turned me on. The franchise continued to innovate with the next game; Underground 2 would take the same street racer concept and apply it to a sprawling open-world map.

The next two games kinda sucked. Don’t get me wrong, Most Wanted and Carbon were alright, but they weren’t as impressive as the last two games were to me. The introduction of a proper storyline in Most Wanted was entertaining, but the cars all actually felt like the economic cars they were supposed to be. Every bump made the car lurch and lean, and catching air was cool until you fell to the ground in a fashion that felt like the suspension was blowing itself out. Rather than making mistakes because you were driving too fast in Underground, I was trying to fight my clumsy car and getting into trouble when it wouldn’t behave. Carbon had all of these problems and included a directionless, confusing plot.

The NFS game after Carbon, called ProStreet, was an even bigger mess.

The handling model sucked. The deep level of vinyl customization introduced in Carbon was even buggier here in ProStreet. Getting my ass kicked by supercars made me feel like I had to buy those same cars, but damaging them was extremely easy and too expensive. The main antagonist is a one-dimensional asshole. An update made the game crash regularly. The cars felt even heavier than they did in the last two games combined.

And you know what? I fucking loved it.

The edgy, DIY aesthetic of the cars were combined perfectly with the punk rock soundtrack. Every ugly multi-coloured monster I designed, no matter how hard it was on the eyes, could fit perfectly in a universe where every other car on the grid was an equally ugly, expendable pile of junk. The ability to mix and match rims made my drift and drag cars look like the real cars I could find at a grassroots event. The damage model was better than it ever has been; bumpers and hoods could fall off, mirrors could hang and dangle from their sockets, the body panels could cave in, bulge out and crack. I had just as much fun personalizing these cars as I did wrecking them.

ProStreet easily became my favorite in the entire franchise. It wasn’t perfect, but it was as close to perfection as Electronic Arts had come since the first NFS I had played. After ProStreet, the franchise slipped downhill slowly. Undercover felt like a cheap Chinese bootleg of Most Wanted. Shift felt like a sterilized version of ProStreet. I was bored.

To pass the time until a proper NFS installment could satiate my desire to bomb shitty tuner cars around a race track, I picked up Burnout: Paradise. It’s my favorite video game that isn’t a Need for Speed installment. It took all the best moments out of the previous games in the franchise and smashed them into an open-world map that was filled to the rim with secret shortcuts, smashable billboards and tricky traffic jammed streets. The crashing felt so good that losing a race never made me feel bad; it just meant I was having too much fun seeing my car crumple into a tiny metal ball.

Electronic Arts had bought out Criterion, the people behind the Burnout franchise. Paradise was their last hurrah, because their next game was a call back to the second PC game I owned: Need for Speed Hot Pursuit.

When it was announced, I lost my mind. My second favorite franchise was developed by Criterion, and now they were making a game using the same name as one of the first video games I played as a kid. It was a dream come true! The handling for current NFS games were stale, and giving the franchise a nitrous boost was all I thought it needed. Hot Pursuit is gonna be like Burnout, but with Porsche’s and Audi’s rather than fake cars! Right?

Nope. The cars felt sluggish, the damage model was dialed back to paint scratches at the request of car manufacturers’ PR teams and the roads were too wide and straight to make racing feel interesting. This was the beginning of the end. It didn’t feel like a typical Need for Speed game, but it didn’t feel like Burnout either. It was as if slapping the NFS name onto the game just immediately tarnished all the trust I had in Criterion to save my favorite franchise from certain doom.

Many years later, I know who killed my franchise. It wasn’t Criterion. Black Box had created many of the lackluster, boring games I hated most in the franchise but they also created my favorite. They weren’t to blame either.

It was EA.

Electronic Arts had gone from an independent developer/publisher company and became the sterile megacorporation I love to hate. It buys out game development studios with high reputations for their ingenious storylines and novel gameplay, then forces those creative developers to create the same results using EA’s in-house game engine, Frostbite. The engine is great when it comes to first-person shooter games like Battlefield, but ever since Need for Speed: The Run, they’ve forced every game in the franchise to use Frostbite.

Criterion’s version of Hot Pursuit used their signature Chameleon engine, but all previous installments were built on the EAGL engine. Need for Speed just didn’t work with the new engine Criterion had developed, but from then on NFS would use EA’s own Frostbite and developers were having an even tougher time making a proper racing game. Developers were forced to take a game engine designed for multiplayer first-person shooters and make it into a fun racing game, and their struggle seemed impossible to overcome. The controls felt counter-intuitive and the abundance of ridiculous bugs turned the whole Frostbite venture into a lost cause to me.

With the death of a franchise came the birth of a new one. Forza Horizon 3 was the first time a Forza game had ever been released onto a PC. Before H3 it was only available on Xbox, but Microsoft made the decision to unify their operating system for mobile, console and personal computer platforms. This meant their console-exclusive franchises were now developed for multiple platforms at once without changing much for the development process. Forza was a Need for Speed competitor I never had the chance to experience since I was a Nintendo and Sony kid, so finally having a chance to taste the competition was gonna be a breath of fresh air.

I got the wind knocked out of me instead. Forza Horizon 3 was everything I wished Need for Speed was, and then some.

I was put in charge of the fictional Horizon Festival in Australia. It’s a huge celebration of motorsports where I could build my favorite cars and race them on roads that could be either temporary closed courses or illicit midnight street races. There weren’t any cops in this game, but I never needed the police to amplify a game that was already cranked to 11. The customization wasn’t as staggering and limitless as it was in most Need for Speed games, but the vinyl editor was more than powerful enough to let me express myself. NFS’ editor was good, but with Forza I was able to replicate beautiful artwork with simple geometric shapes. Fitting little puzzle pieces together to create masterpieces was fun again. More importantly though, the gameplay felt like the exact kind of fun I should’ve been having in Need for Speed. My cars looked great at a standstill and it drove nicely too. That’s all I needed. Forza had it in spades where Need for Speed didn’t.

I’m eternally grateful for Turn 10. They developed a fantastic franchise of video games that kept innovating and progressing, but it never looked back either. Meanwhile, Ghost currently has itself caught in a doorway between what it’s done before and what it should be doing next. With the announcement of Need for Speed Heat, it no doubt looks more of the same.

My king of racing games is dead. I miss my old king.

But the new guy on the throne is doing some pretty cool shit the old king could never wish to do.