The Making Of: The Need For Speed
Following the buyout of Distinctive Software, producer Hanno Lemke gained prerelease access to a cutting-edge console. Hanno Rory tells Milne how his team reimagined racing games with the 3DO classic The Need For Speed
Discover how Electronic Arts created its hit one-on-one racer for the 3DO
Lof the earlyeighties, ike many games developers initial Distinctive Software’s eclectic. But by output was decidedly proven popular 1987, certain genres had specialise in, and this enough for a studio to to a love of fast cars led evolution coupled with for its racing games, the firm becoming renowned
Hanno Lemke as former Distinctive producer about of us were passionate remembers. “A bunch that racing games hadn’t cars, and we really felt on of driving a sports car captured the experience of the car, the risks the open road – the personality
For us it was like: ‘How and the unpredictability. in that experience, and do we immerse somebody need?’ The first of our what technology do we of Drive, but it was a lot racing games was Test so it a new tech base, and investment building out experiences with was smart to create other the engine.” these experiences Over the next four years, of racing, culminating spanned numerous forms pro driver Mario Andretti in a title endorsed by firm Electronic Arts to that convinced the US it EA Canada. To the buy Distinctive and rename appeared to take a break uninitiated, the studio this point, but as Hanno from racing games at
“On the outside, it explains, it was just regrouping. on the inside it was teambuilding looked like a pause, but
It was a small team and tech-building. we started building out that I put together, and were told this new platform technology. Then we the 3DO. We had some was coming out called and we thought this early access to the hardware, to bring the next level would be what we needed genre, but it brought up of experience to the racing our engine, our tech, our a challenge of rethinking approach and our team.”
Hanno to embrace Instrumental in convincing creator, and EA founder, the 3DO was its visionary revelation that the console Trip Hawkins, and his and realistic driving could depict a more expansive and off and did this thing, experience. “Trip went about the potential of he got us really excited be able to stream our CD-ROM drives – we would tracks. With the processing world and create larger with rigid body collisions power we could do more more realistic.” and make the cars feel
But as important as realism was to
Hanno’s next-generation racing game, it was even more crucial that it was fun to play, and so the producer and his team did some research.
“We played a lot of Outrun initially – with its variety of terrains,” Hanno notes. “I guess there were some PC simulation-oriented titles, but the bulk were pretty twitch-based. We looked at the sensation of speed, the exhilaration of driving. So we played a lot of the racing games at the time – dating back to the top-down Micro Machines, but we wanted to deliver a different title to market.”
The approach Hanno took to creating something different was to work out why open road driving was so exhilarating, and while doing so the producer identified three distinct routes for his game. “The first route we modelled was ‘Alpine’,” Hanno recollects. “We had this drive from
Vancouver up to a place called Whistler
– it was single-carriageway, and was on one side down to the ocean and the other side up to the hills. So we took the boss’s 944 Turbo, strapped a video camera into the car and went ripping up that road to get the sense of how things moved past you at 100mph. A drive down the Pacific highway from Oregon to California inspired the ‘Coastal’ route, and on the ‘City’ route we wanted a place where you could reach the top speeds.” Although these high-speed experiments convinced Hanno to set his project on the open road, the producer did also consider adding closed circuits. “We wanted the experience of weaving through traffic,” Hanno enthuses, “the adrenaline of pushing your speed and hoping you didn’t blow it through a speed trap and the sensation when you saw the red and the blue lights in your rear-view mirror.
Now, we absolutely loved racing on the track as well, but we had to pick; it was limited resources, limited time.”
A second design decision resulted in Hanno’s game being based around a one-on-one rivalry rather than a field of competitors, which, as the producer explains, was partly inspired by a bad movie with a great race. “There was this great scene is this movie called Against
All Odds,” Hanno recalls. “It had
Jeff Bridges in a Porsche and
James Woods in a Ferrari on the Santa Monica freeway,
and they had this grudge-match.
They went flying through traffic and red lights – crazy stuff – and that captured the essence of what we wanted. To bring five, six, seven other competitors would have made it feel like a different experience.” But although his project would revolve around just two competitors, Hanno ensured that these duelling rivals would have a number of fast cars to choose from. “We picked a handful of cars very deliberately around their personalities and balance,” Hanno reasons.
“We felt that none of them were exactly the same, and there was some reason to pick each one, so when you came up against a different car that would be interesting. Is Porsche really better than
Ferrari? Is Supra really going to out-do a Lamborghini?”
As well as top-end sports cars,
Hanno’s artists rendered less exotic vehicles for law-abiding NPC drivers and AI cop cars, the occupants of which took a hard-line approach to speeding that prompted EA Canada to consider the PR implications of virtual lawbreaking. “The legal department had some concerns,” Hanno concedes, “and so our pitch was quite simple – there are consequences to crazy driving in the real world, and it’s our responsibility to put them in front of players. We made a little bit of fun of the police, like many movies had done, but they were a counter to reckless speeds.
So we went with it, and legal said: ‘Yeah, okay, we get it.’”
Somewhat less realistic, however, were the over-the-top collisions subsequently implemented in Hanno’s game, which pleased the producer far more than others on his team. “We had some physicists on the project,” Hanno grins,
“and they were, like: ‘It’s just not real!’ And then we had QA testers and us – producers and designers – who were saying: ‘Yeah, but this is fun, right?’ I think that the balance that we ultimately sought was believable but still fun.” Further debate followed when
Hanno and his team got their first look at a series of video clips depicting the player’s competitor
Mister X, and in particular his repetitive loudmouthed taunts.
“He certainly wasn’t one of our finest moments,” Hanno admits, “but we had a CD-ROM, and we said: ‘How do we fill this thing?’
So we partnered with a production company.
The idea was that when you were racing somebody on the street you would smack-talk each other, but people got annoyed because there wasn’t enough variety.
so one coded Half the team hated Mister X, and muted an Easter egg where keypad combinations his face!” him – you would see duct tape across firm However, footage shot by the same and highlighting showcasing the cars in the game went down each vehicle’s individual personality reflects. “I think far better with the team, as Hanno job in how the production company did a brilliant added an they filmed some of those cars. They lighting and introduction for each one, and the the music. The visual effects balanced the cuts of heavy metal, Diablo was the badass car with the
So I think they and the Ferrari was more refined. did a nice job of conveying personality.” expensive On the question of how these vastly filmed, Hanno sports cars were assembled to be of two reveals that it required the co-operation have any well-known developers. “We didn’t to part budget, so we had to convince people with them. The with their cars and let us do stuff
Roberts – creator Testarossa was owned by Chris belonged to of Wing Commander, the Diablo days, the 911 Richard Garriott from the Ultima and in some belonged to the CFO of EA Canada people in the cases we literally went to random interested in street and asked them if they were being part of this.”
In addition to videos, the presentation of Hanno’s racing game also benefited from the involvement of an acclaimed car magazine, whose name prefaced project – the title chosen for the near-complete For Speed.
Road And Track Presents The Need they were able to “They had a load of pictures that of the voiceovers contribute, and they wrote some discloses. “On the for the car presentations,” Hanno understand some engineering side, they helped us of the cars and of the more subtle characteristics physics model. how we might portray them in our so putting them To be honest, they weren’t gamers, a gamepad behind the wheel and giving them played it and they didn’t yield the best fruit. But we were able to give feedback.”
The Following on from the game’s playtesting, near unanimous Need For Speed was released to acknowledged acclaim, although Hanno’s team plaudits. “At the few criticisms as well as the many by Mister X and the time, we were embarrassed the game didn’t anxious about the feedback that we were feel very fast even though. But overall happy and proud of the release.” voices
More than 20 years later, Hanno long-term satisfaction over The Need For Speed’s with genuine appeal and looks back at his game still going fondness. “It’s just cool to see people set the stakes back to it. What I’m proud of is we to do, and we in the ground for what we wanted that we were able definitely took some risks. I think absolutely a to move the genre forward. It was but super fun. It riot doing it – I mean, long hours and I’m really was a formative game in my career, of it.” super thankful to have been part
racing back Many thanks to Hanno Lemke for to The Need For Speed.