“Making a winner look good” – Need for Speed: Underground

**Need for Speed: Underground** (EA, PlayStation 2, 2003)

From the start of October 2003 to the end of January 2004, the week when Pro Evolution Soccer 3 was the UK’s #1 game was the only week when an Electronic Arts game wasn’t on top of the charts. For one third of the year, taking in the Christmas sales peak and surrounds, it was almost non-stop EA, a level of single-publisher domination not seen since Ocean’s late ‘80s pomp.

This was the culmination of a long period of EA expansion and retrenchment, of relentlessly buying up developers to back a range of possibilities. It was a self-reinforcing position, too, as can easily be seen by the resource EA was able to plow into promoting and refreshing FIFA in the face of a threat to its status as the defining football game. It’s a process with consequences I’ll be wrestling with for a long time yet, and which can’t be entirely untangled from enjoyable games produced along the way.

Sports games were EA’s biggest stranglehold, but it was blockbusters in two other genres which accounted for most of this particular period of dominance. And Need for Speed: Underground, a game that took a moderately successful series supernova in a similar way to Medal of Honor: Rising Sun’s predecessor Frontline, had something in common with that other series. Medal of Honor took a popular genre, the first-person shooter, and gave it a specific glossy cinematic treatment: GoldenEye 007 but make it Saving Private Ryan. With Need for Speed: Underground, EA Black Box did likewise for the road car racing game, with an even easier-to-grasp high concept: Gran Turismo, but make it Fast & Furious.

2 Fast 2 Furious topped the UK box office on release but the series was not yet as big as it would later get. Nonetheless, its subject matter was already finding its way into games and there was a gap for more. Need for Speed: Underground consists of a series of competitions against a handful of other cars in the world of illegal street racing, taking in circuits, sprints, drag races and drift contests. Winning each one gains money and opens up further contests and sometimes new models of car. The loop of competing to win to upgrade to compete is the same one that I love in Gran Turismo, though very much simplified. You only have one car at a time, and switching between them as they become available is simple and cheap. The progression of races and championships is frequently completely linear: you have one choice, and you need to keep at it until you can win, although you can select different difficulty levels each attempt.

That simplification does not run all the way through but reflects a different philosophy. In Gran Turismo, you can spend forever saving up to make tiny invisible tweaks to your gear ratios in the hopes of improving performance, but you only actually see your car change once when you upgrade it to full racing mode. Need for Speed: Underground gives you a handful of big performance upgrade packages which are trivially easy to buy, and instead focuses in massive detail in what really matters: what your car looks like. Your options for spoilers, roof scoops, tinted windows, neon lights and go faster stripes are exponentially greater than for anything under the bonnet.

At first I wondered what the point of upgrading said bonnet — sorry, hood — was, given that I wouldn’t see it from the behind-the-car view. But Need for Speed: Underground has that covered. Every time you go over one of its tracks’ many jumps, it switches to a different slow motion view with more of the car visible, a chance to bathe in the flashy beauty of your ride before reverting to driving it. And flashy beauty is the guiding principle more generally.

These nighttime street races may be illegal and underground, but their organisers have somehow still managed to put whacking great lit-up arrows everywhere to mark the course, and everything goes by in a neon blur. Underground’s tracks are a series of interlinked circuits and routes through a fictional city, a built-up version of the old Ridge Racer approach of track variations, and the game conveys a sense of excitement at bright lights, big city, fast cars in all of its racing as much as in its PG cutscenes.

The racing is, in a technical sense, a long way behind TOCA or even Gran Turismo. Extreme levels of rubberbanding designed to stop you getting irretrievably far away from competitors in either direction also keep you from really racing with them. There is little sense of the other cars as genuine competitors, rather than staging marks to be quickly glimpsed as you fly past them or vice versa. Your performance in the latter stages of any race counts for much more than the beginning, as even after flawless laps one big collision can send you backwards in the order as surely as any Mario Kart blue shell.

This travesty of racing actually works, though. Combined with racing on roads with not just pillars and walls waiting to catch you but unpredictable normal traffic — one of the carry-overs from earlier Need for Speed games — it means that you can never completely relax. The tension of trying to avoid ending your racing chances by plowing into some hapless white van adds to the already visually fantastic sense of speed.

The format of the drag races, an even further exaggerated version of that mechanic, really brings out how central this is to the Underground experience. The rev counter takes up a big proportion of the screen as you try to change gears at the right time, while racing in a straight line at screen shaking speed in discrete lanes which you switch between with a nudge left or right, like an old LCD game. Hit a vehicle and you get the cinematic view again to see your car flipping end over end and a message that it is totalled. It distills the all-or-nothing speed message perfectly.

Back in the standard races, meanwhile, if you manage to narrowly avoid oncoming traffic you get rewarded with something called style points, which are also awarded for shortcuts, powerslides and jumps. Style points complete the loop of Underground’s guiding philosophy, bringing together ideas from several more rival racers (Midnight Club, Project Gotham Racing) in one smart package. Even if you get wiped out of a race at the end, you still earn style points, which are what open up your customisation options. Look good and you get rewarded not just by looking good but by being allowed to look better. Every time repeated failures at a particular race started to become a little frustrating, there was always the draw that I was at least still edging closer to being able to stick pink lights under my car.

Eurogamer’s review following Underground’s release highlighted that very few people were playing it online on PS2, so there won’t have been many people showing off their customised cars to remote rivals. For me, the benefit of upgrades was just for me and the flimsy characters populating what story there is (you get shown your car making the occasional magazine cover, too, some of which needlessly apply male pronouns to your unseen and unheard character). Yet I still found the motivating force of earning new bits quite powerful, the sharpest demonstration yet of the power of cosmetic upgrades, at least when built into the philosophy of a wider package well. In Underground, like in EA’s similarly cosmetic-upgrade-heavy Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, all the shiny new things cost is time and sometimes a bit of frustration. There’s no idea of paying actual money for them. Yet. As with Dogz, though, it’s tempting to hold its descendants against it. My enjoyment of Need for Speed: Underground comes tinged with the feeling that its most effective mechanics are one step closer to loot boxes.