12/10/2019 Written by Judy Liu

One concept that has been popular since the early days of gaming is the racing game. Today, racing games come in multiple forms. Some of them can be pure adrenaline fests based solely on avoiding running off the road while driving as speedily as possible, and others might be more realistic and more strategy based – you may do more to boost your scores by choosing the right cars and parts than you do by good driving.

Obviously, Need for Speed falls into the second category. It is one of the biggest franchises owned by Electronic Arts, with a long history that could be traced back to the 1990s. The first title in this series, Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, was released in 1994 on the 3DO, and the latest one, Need for Speed: Heat, was just released in November 2019. Among the long list of titles in this series, Need for Speed: No Limits was the first and only free-to-play version made exclusively for mobile devices, unlike past mobile games in the series that were simply adaptions of various Need for Speed PC and console versions. Though accessible only on the mobile screen, Need for Speed: No Limits appears to be a tradition keeper, just like many of its predecessors and successors, maintaining the typical gameplay and narratives that shape players’ experience.

To put it crudely, almost all the Need for Speed titles employ the same core fundamental rules and mechanics, and No Limits is no exception. At the beginning of the game, you, as part of an underground racing club, are given an entry-level vehicle to accomplish certain tasks by racing, such as delivering goods or participating in illegal drag races, while evading the local law enforcement in police pursuits. No matter what exactly the mission is, all you have to do is to control your car in a variety of races, with the ultimate goal to outfox all the opponents/police along the course. As you progress through the game, you are able to acquire more wraps to customize the car and unlock and upgrade more vehicles with the performance parts rewarded. Besides, what makes Need for Speed distinctive is that it has something beyond just crossing the finish line. Performing certain skills like drifting, airborne, and near-miss during the race allows you to get more rewards, and as your garage is expanded, you have to consider twice when selecting the car for a certain race, or you have to calculate if installing the material that you just won from an intensive competition into one car instead of another will best boost your performance.

Odd is that different from its counterparts on PC and consoles (and many other racing games), Need for Speed: No Limits has relatively short racing – in fact, many races can be finished within 50 seconds – so one would not be surprised when hearing the saying that this game is not about racing skills, it’s all about upgrading and collecting cars. To put it another way, Need for Speed: No Limits is at some level a car version of collectible card games, where racing functions as a means to an end and the end is getting more cars. Teaming with first-tier automobile designers in the real world, Electronic Arts did put much effort into building the best model and improving the appearance of cars in game. It turns out that this strategy works so well that the stunningly beautiful vehicles, coming from a wide range of classes including Street, Classic Sports, Muscle, Super, and Hyper, bring about an infectious sense of delight, a giddiness that captivates players with their sheer outlandishness. Browsing the showroom and having the cars show up in your own garage is just like witnessing what would happen if you devoted millions of dollars to bringing your childhood Hot Wheels fantasies to real life.

A lot of reviews criticize Need for Speed: No Limits in terms of its complicated microtransactions and the very rigid metagame that surrounds the beautifully crafted racing and collecting experience. The freemium model of the game entails a lot of in-game barriers, a great amount of waiting and grinding, that are set to encourage spending and treat players as merely consumers rather than members of a gaming community. Just like many other free-to-play games, this game starts off with very easy access to victories and offer very addictive gameplay with lots of rewards, but as you progress further, you will feel the opponents with cars having increasingly higher PR and running superfast unbeatable, and get forced to grind past races to collect rewards and upgrade your collections. The game is also full of choke points where players cannot continue unless you have reached a certain VIP level or have a certain car, or one of your cars has reached a certain performance rating. And there is the design of barriers in car upgrading, too. Once a part of the car has achieved its maximum rating, its rarity can be converted to the next higher level through the use of conversion kits, and it thus becomes more difficult to collect the performance parts that match the rarity.

Albeit not free of criticism, Need for Speed: No Limits receives a score of 4.8/5 from around 154 thousand players on the iOS store and ranks the 11th among all the 200 racing games, thanks to Electronic Arts’ publishing power and the strong intellectual property. Over more than 20 years, the Need for Speed sequels came and went, and so did the reputation of this franchise. Though it’s hard to imagine a “Need for Speed person” today – we hardly hear people say they are fanatical about Need for Speed now – the whole series was once a hit that every teenage boy wished to own and master, especially during the first half of the 2000s when the legacy installments, Need for Speed: Underground and Need for Speed: Most Wanted were released. Up till now, there are 136,093 edits and 3,618 articles in total on Need for Speed Fandom page created since April 14, 2006, and 19 million likes and 19 million follows on Facebook. This franchise is the most prolific and enduring racing game of all times, and its titles still contribute largely to Electronic Arts’ revenue to this day. According to the company’s 2019 Annual Report, the decrease in their product net revenue was in part offset by a $253 million increase primarily from Need for Speed: Payback, The Sim 4, and the UFC franchise.

Then, what did Need for Speed series do right? To many players, the long-lasting appeal of Need for Speed lies in its realism and audio and visual effects that simulate perfectly-rendered cars driving around perfectly-rendered tracks. In a racing game, you can do something you’d never do in real life – cars are all around us, but how often do we have the ability to push the gas pedal and see how fast they can go without risking our lives? However, this fantasy is something that everyone can imagine, as we all know how exciting driving a go-kart can be. The feeling of the tires struggling for grip on the smooth track surface, the loud sound of scratching made by gear control levers, and every bump in the road travels through our body all made us fascinated. Developers and designers built these feelings into the game with great control that matches vehicle behaviors, and every heavy crash is accompanied by spectacular scenes with blossoming debris and scuffed wheels. In addition, the game offers true competitive artificial intelligence to race against, and on the other spectrum, player vs. player competitions also bring about most of the fun. The Tournaments or Underground Rivals in Need for Speed series work properly in this respect not only because its traditional online races are great, but because it combines multiplayer with ghost mode and leaderboards, encouraging players to challenge each other. The two types of competition – against AI and other real-world people – are woven into everything players do.

But before the adrenaline-fueled battles commence, the only thing players care about is the car, or more specifically, the appearance of the car. Stylish vehicles are not merely a feature of Need for Speed: No Limits but of all the other titles in this franchise. In the digital era, every video game is a potential showroom for sponsored content. Games usually offer appealing ways to showcase products without intimidating price tags that might push customers away. As McClary, Ford’s digital marketing manager said in an interview, “(the game) is a great opportunity to talk to the public in an un-intimidating environment where they can do things on their own terms.” Decades ago, however, driving a Ford in a video game was something unheard of. It was not until the first Need for Speed title came around that people were finally capable of driving real cars with real horsepower and top speeds in a game. Electronic Arts changed the rules and since then, the company has established partnerships with a variety of automobile brands to design and model hundreds of real cars for its franchise, with details ranging from the physics of their suspension systems down to the finish of their dashboards. Digitizing automobiles is a meticulous process, but it’s a mutually beneficial option for both game developers and auto companies. On the one hand, car placement in the racing game actually generated a notable portion of revenue for the companies, and on the other, the games can attract players with extraordinary designs and models including everything from 1950s collectibles to the unreleased concept from the future.

As mentioned briefly before, in November 2019, Electronic Arts just released the series’ 24th installment titled Need for Speed: Heat. The company is once again selling the same fantasy that we’ve seen since the 1950s, targeting a mostly American audience – young men who steeped in, or at least aware of, contemporary street racing and hot rod culture. Americans have long been obsessed with speed. Nowadays, Nascar (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) is still the second most lucrative sport in the US, behind American football. But despite the popularity of Nascar and drag racing, there remains a sub-culture devoted to illegal street racing. Cars, racing, and speed have been for many people throughout history a way of life – either a means to make a living, or a means to escape. Especially in Southern California, where the street racing culture stemmed, to make a car go as fast as possible and to be able to control it was a sign of masculinity and maturity, which lures hundreds of millions of young males. But nowadays, street racing is nowhere near as popular as it was several decades ago. People have witnessed enough injuries and fatalities caused by the irrational pursuit of speed. Lots of grisly accidents have been widely covered in the media in the past years, with drivers and spectators alike getting killed during street races. According to a report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2001, the same year the first Fast and Furious film came out, police listed street racing as a factor in 135 fatal crashes, nearly double the number from the previous year. In response to this situation, law enforcement today has a much more powerful backup for police interceptors to crack down on lawbreakers. This year, Ford announced that the in-coming 2020 police vehicle featuring a 3.0L EcoBoost engine and full-time Intelligent All-Wheel Drive outperformed all other interceptors including V8-powered utility vehicle in the test and would become the fastest cop car ever. So technically speaking, there isn’t quite the street racing culture that people once had in the 50s, 60s, or 70s, times “when crime, racial tension, and police brutality were at a boiling point.” Street racing stories have become the stuff of legends, but we have no choice but turn to entertainment for experiencing such a culture.

A survey by Pew Research Center found that racing is “among one of the two most widely played video game genres.” Not only that, car chasing and racing scenes make up a large percentage of Hollywood action movies. Actually, if we take a closer look at the narrative of Need for Speed, we can easily find that the thread bears some likeness to typical Hollywood melodramas with a model that has been tested by many blockbusters such as the Fast and Furious franchise. In Need for Speed, with the support from your crew, you play as a street racer trying to make it big in the underground scene while avoiding being caught up by the police and sometimes dealing with villains. Sometimes the game even offers special events that introduce an undercover cop, Officer Rivera in No Limits, for example, as the player’s partner, who knows much about the antagonist and wanted to clamp down on him. In some of the Need for Speed titles, there is also a lead female role such as Mia in Most Wanted and Jessica in Payback, who looks a lot like Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty Ortiz – tough, daring, skillful, and independent. Most of the game is set on the streets of a city resembling Los Angeles and Miami, where most of the Fast and Furious sequences take place and hot-rod lovers gather together for illegal street races. A great number of close-up shots of gears being shifting and pedals being pressed in the movie are devoted to fetishizing the cars and offering a glamorized depiction of the culture. In a similar manner, serving as a flattering view of your self-modded, souped-up cars, the opening moments of each race in the game, before you take off, focus on the well-polished and brightly colored appearance of the vehicle, from which we feel the vehicle’s power, performance, and appeal. In short, Need for Speed to some extent feels like a spinoff of the Hollywood racing movie at every level from the overall storyline to the scene breakdowns.

Indeed, Electronic Arts did much more attempts to exploit the Need for Speed IP. Working with Dreamworks Pictures, it made an eponymous film starring Aaron Paul, an award-winning actor from Breaking Bad. The film was released in March 2014, months before the franchise’s 20th anniversary. The story sounds as basic as many other action movies: Aaron’s character runs a small mechanic’s shop with a group of his friends and street races on the side, but after his dad passed away, he has no choice but to take a risk and participate in street racing to save enough money, save his reputation, and avenge his fallen friend. Again, here comes the classic Hollywood narrative style – the protagonist must be an active and goal-oriented person who, when an unexpected accident breaks the balance of life, reacts to a series of situations with positive motivations in spite of all the obstacles – let alone the perfectly executed racing scenes and effects that lead to adrenaline rush. Despite receiving negative reviews, the film ended up grossing over $200 million at the worldwide box office. Featuring the most exotic cars on the planet from Bugatti to McLaren to Koenigsegg, Electronic Arts and Dreamworks monetized on a group of people fascinated by the street racing culture.

Nostalgia has been a driving force in many forms of media consumption. In 2015, The Washington Post wrote a story claiming that Americans’ love affair with cars is over. But is that really true? Admittedly, the article offers a plausible explanation that the recession in 2008 was a turning point that presented a barrier to car ownership for many Americans, especially the Millennials, and now economy recovers, but we have already got Uber and Lyft. However, the decline in car ownership doesn’t mean that automobiles are not important in people’s lives and memories anymore. Googling “street racing culture”, we can easily find more than 100 million pages that send people down the Internet rabbit hole to a long and enjoyable time. Due to safety and legal issues, it’s true that there aren’t so many people as before gathering for a drag race on the streets, but players dedicating large blocks of time and money to the game and audiences flocking into the cinema have proved that this sort of street racing nostalgia still works out. We’ve seen enough how modern car enthusiasts have for a long time allowed the media to derive benefits from the object of their obsession and from the street racing experiences originating from the 1950s. The only question it begs is: now that Need for Speed, same as its counterparts in the cinema, has played around the similar formula for more than a couple decades, does the gameplay truly remain as addictive as it used to be, or, does the game itself has become something we are nostalgic for?