Need For Speed: Underground
Every month we celebrate the most important, innovative, or just plain great games from PlayStation’s past. This month we’re making like Paul Walker to revisit an age of mandatory neons and optional brake pedals
Before Underground, Need For Speed had pulled up in a creative cul-de-sac. The exotic vehicle licences with which it made its name in the ’90s were getting played out by 2002’s Hot Pursuit II, and now the wow factor had worn off driving a low-poly Ferrari around prosaic countryside roads, it turned out there wasn’t an awful lot else to get hot under the bonnet about.
EA’s solution was to hand the franchise to its Black Box studio, which had handled the critically favoured
PS2 port of Hot Pursuit II. It shifted the tone towards a tuner culture that was starting to seep into mainstream consciousness thanks to The Fast And The Furious. Out with the Fezzas, in with Golf GTIs under layers of vinyl.
Which makes Underground not just a fantastic arcade racer with an unprecedented story-led campaign and buttery handling, but a fascinating time capsule that captures what was in our heads in 2003. Lil Jon and his Eastside Boyz hollering “Skeet skeet mother[blorp!]er!” in the main menu screen. Girls in crop tops and combats strutting past Nissans. Intense men in skintight vests telling you this isn’t a game in interstitial cutscenes. And, most importantly, customised motors.
That’s not to put down
Underground’s story. It was really something at the time, not because it holds up particularly well to scrutiny, but because of the purpose it served. You were a would-be street racer with barely $10,000 to spend on your first vehicle. A nobody with it all to do, and a mate called Samantha constantly taking the piss out of you. Compared to ‘Select Lamborghini, drive it in 25 circuit races, watch end credits’, this was an irresistible premise that gave meaning to your progress through the ranks.
What begins as late-night amateur hour action in sensible hatchbacks
YOU WERE A WOULDBE STREET RACER WITH BARELY $10,000 TO SPEND ON A VEHICLE.
that can barely break the speed limit gradually evolves into Vin-Diesel-worthy racing in tricked out Skylines, Supras, and Integra Type Rs that hardly ever dip below it. And it’s all the sweeter for those silly cutscenes, fleshing out the narrative that you earned it all.
SPOILER ALERT
Black Box’s smartest introduction, beyond the zeitgeist-infused soundtrack and the perpetually damp moonlit streets showing off its lighting effects, was in putting car ownership at the heart of the game. It understands there’s pleasure in buying a Nissan
350Z instead of just selecting it from a menu, and in making it your own by applying body kits, decals, two-tone paint jobs and little stickers advertising rim manufacturers. Everyone probably bought the Skyline by the end of the game; it was the best car. But it’s unlikely any two of them looked identical. Little touches like seeing your car on the cover of tuner magazines deepens this fantasy, both that the collection of polygons is a car you now own and have stamped your identity on, and that it’s powered your ascension through the ranks of Olympic City’s racers.
The formula was so successful that it informed the trajectory of Need For Speed for the following decade, and provided the reference point for 2019’s Rivals. But just as the Fast And Furious series is soldiering on despite its pop culture relevance having faded, modern Need For Speed titles can’t capture how edgy it felt to race around in modded Japanese hatchbacks instead of footballer-fodder supercars in 2003.