A Need for Speed

Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989, when I was sixteen years old. The bad thing about a Beetle was that you could generally expect no more than 60,000 miles or so out of the motor; the good thing was that you could rebuild the motor in your garage over a long weekend and make it good as new again. My inner Luddite, who seems to become stronger almost by the day in our current era of feverish tech-sector nonsense, still feels that something was lost when we stopped making cars that were so amenable to shade-tree mechanics.

I had a couple of other Beetles over the decade and a half that followed that first one, along with a number of other vehicles that made them look like the height of sober-minded practicality.

I had a 1965 Ford Mustang that was rusted out so badly it was literally on the verge of breaking in two. (I maybe should have taken a look underneath before I bought it.) I sold it to a fellow who ran an import/export business; the plan was to send it to Finland for restoration and resale, which means my old Mustang may have beat me to northern Europe by about fifteen years.

I had a 1969 MGB that was determined to prove every cliché about the quirky unreliability of British sports cars to be the gospel truth. I learned that there’s a reason that Lucas Industries, which was responsible for the electrical systems in those cars, is known in enthusiast circles as “the Prince of Darkness.” That MGB is the only car I’ve ever driven where you had a choice between headlights and windshield wipers; there wasn’t enough juice to run them both at the same time. Then again, you probably didn’t want to be driving in the rain anyway, because never was an MGB made without a top that leaked like a sieve. All that aside, the car was a hell of a lot of fun whenever the weather was good and it decided it was in the mood to start.

I had a 1975 Nissan — or Datsun, as they were known in the United States back then — 280Z. It was more fun to drive than any car I’ve ever owned, even the MGB, with an in-line six-cylinder engine that was the stuff of which car-nerd wet dreams are made. For some reason, I decided to swap that 280Z for a 1981 280ZX. I knew I had made a terrible mistake within a week, even if the new car did have the exact same engine. It was like trading the svelte Elvis of 1956 for the fat one of 1976.

But the all-around funnest vehicle I’ve ever owned — not just fun to drive, but fun in general — was a 1972 Volkswagen camper van. It would do about 50 miles per hour flat-out on level ground. Driving it felt weirdly like guiding a boat, and not only because the engine was chirping away about fifteen feet behind you when you sat at the wheel. You could expect a delay of several seconds to any control input as it bobbed and swayed gently on its well-worn springs. So, you just kind of pointed it in the general direction you wanted to go and hoped for the best. Looking back on it, it was a good thing that it wouldn’t go any faster.

That little Volkswagen bus could sleep four people — or rather two couples, assuming you didn’t want to cuddle too much with mere friends. There could be two in the back and two under the pop-up roof, with just a thin net between them and the great outdoors. It had a little refrigerator, a little stove, and even a little heater that ran on — I kid you not — pure gasoline. It’s a wonder that we didn’t blow ourselves up at some point during the weekends that we drove the magic bus up from Dallas to southern Oklahoma’s Arbuckle Mountains.

The joys of all of these oddball vehicles started to pale a bit for me as I entered my thirties. (Come to think of it, it was at about this same point that I started to feel too old for backpacker hostels; this must have been the borderline that marked the onset of a belated adulthood.) In 2004, I bought a Volkswagen GTI that was just a few years old instead of a few decades. It was a nice enough car, but it was kind of soft and heavy in the same way that the Datsun 280ZX had been. Still, it did have the advantage of being (more or less) reliable.

Then I moved to Denmark in 2009 with my new wife, and that was that for the car life. We didn’t even own a car for ten years thereafter. I re-familiarized myself with the lost (to me) art of biking, which is certainly a healthier way to get around as one closes in on middle age. These days we have a Hyundai Plug-In Hybrid, which is… fine, but it doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping, you know? Discounting the odd roadside emergency, I haven’t looked under a hood with deadly intent in seventeen years. I can’t even tell one (modern) car from another anymore.

And yet nothing that we have done and been in our lives ever truly and completely leaves us, does it? Our current house, which we moved into four and a half years ago, has quite a big yard, such that I have to cut the grass with a garden tractor. I still feel a certain quickening in my soul when I smell gasoline and oil and hear the motor fire up, still enjoy doing the maintenance myself. In fact, I just bought a new (to me) tractor this year; I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the best one in our village. I do like to ride around on it, the child being the father to the man and all. As one of my wife’s uncles likes to say, every man should have a tractor of his own, whether real or metaphorical.

But that’s far as I go these days. Sometimes I muse about getting a project car, but I know that I don’t really have the time, and probably not the long-term desire either. I content myself with the occasional veteran bil exhibition (as they’re called here in Denmark) and with seeing what’s on Jay Leno’s Garage each week on YouTube. (If it’s something old, I’m in; if it’s something new, I move on; if it’s something borrowed or something blue, I’m as confused as you are.)

Here’s the weird thing, though: I never had all that much interest in driving cars on the computer, even when my passion for the real McCoys was at its peak. Of course, there are various sub-genres of driving games, as there are of all other types. I’m not so surprised that I never got into the hardcore racing simulations, where it becomes all about grip and downforce and gear ratios and wind-tunnel coefficients and many other numbers I don’t really understand. God bless those who like that sort of thing, but I never had the patience for it, whether the vehicle being modeled is an airplane, a ship, a submarine, or a racing car. Yet I never cared much more about what we might call the aspirational driving games: you know, the ones that assemble a bunch of exotic street cars and set you loose with them, on the premise that, if you can’t afford them in the real world, you can satisfy at least some of your lust for them vicariously on the computer.

I think the problem for me here was that I didn’t aspire to what these aspirational games were offering. At some point many years ago now — definitely before I learned to drive in the real world — high-end sports car reached a level of performance that made them, in my opinion, less rather than more fun. They started to not just include but require traction control and all manner of other driver-assistance measures just to make them controllable, which detracted from the purity of the experience. At the same time, they became so ridiculously fast in comparison to the traffic laws of the realm that I’m left wondering what you’re actually supposed to do with them, assuming you don’t want to be a jerk who endangers everyone else on the road and likely gets himself thrown in jail and his car confiscated before all is said and done. (Denmark isn’t known for being tough on crime, but they do love to confiscate cars here…)

There’s an old saying that has long been my mantra on this subject: “It’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.” Just last year, my wife and I took a holiday to Zagori, a mountainous region in the northwest of Greece, close to the border with Albania. We were there to hike, but I had just as much fun driving our rental car, a Ford something-or-other with a gerbil wheel attached to a couple of rubber bands for an engine, up and down switchback mountain roads that sometimes had me shifting all the way down to first gear. I know that electric cars are the socially responsible future and all, but I’m a little sad that I most presumably won’t be able to rent a simple, basic traditional car like this one for much longer, then proceed to wring every last bit of potential out of it in the old-fashioned, manual way. In my book, that’s a lot more fun than driving a Ferrari responsibly on the same roads would be.

In short, then, the aspirational driving sims were sold on the premise that you really, really wanted to own the exotic cars they featured, and I never particularly did; if we’re being completely honest, I find most post-1970s supercars to be painfully tacky-looking in addition to everything else. This goes a long way toward explaining why I’ve scarcely seen fit to mention driving games in these histories before today. On top of my personal proclivities, I would add one last factor. Some gaming genres, I’ve come to learn, age better than other ones, and thus do more to encourage re-visitation. If you ask me, adventure, puzzle, and action games age the best, followed by CRPG and strategy games. (The latter tending to be more complicated genres in general, they do often fall completely or partially victim to shifting interface conventions; we’ve learned how to present information and let the player twiddle the knobs so much better over the decades that going too far back can be a pain.)

At the bottom of the heap in this respect are undoubtedly sports games and vehicular simulations. As purported simulations of the real world, such games foreground technology more than they do design, meaning that there’s less reason to revisit them when the technology moves on and can present simulations of a better fidelity. If you were to create a list of the most prominent and respected designers of gaming’s various ages, you would find that virtually none of them worked in these genres. (The only name I can think of off-hand is Sid Meier, who did so very early in his career, a fact that I hear trotted out from time to time as a curious anecdote: “Did you know he used to make flight simulators before Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon and Civilization?”)

Sports games and sims tend to be as ephemeral as they are anonymous. The former are generally cranked out on an explicitly annual basis, with the year appended right there to the name, with all of the teams and athletes of right now. If you’re still stuck with an earlier year’s edition, and if you don’t happen to be a very special sort of cultural time traveler indeed, you’re left out, bereft and bereaved. You can still find plenty of die-hard partisans of Civilization II or IV or VI. I presume that you can also find footie fans who insist that FC 24 is where it’s really at and the later versions are pants — you can find anything on the Internet if you look hard enough — but they seem to be a lot less common. Driving games are for all practical purposes the same. Each new annual or biennial edition of the big franchises comes chock-a-block with all of the hot cars of that moment. Who wants to be stuck with a bunch of old cars? (I do! I do! But much older…)

All of which helps to clarify why a quick glance around the retro-gaming blogosphere reveals a CRPG Addict, a Wargaming Scribe, an Adventurers’ Guild, an All the (Text) Adventures project, even a Space Game Junkie, but no one seems to be documenting every iteration of Tiger Woods PGA Tour or Microsoft Flight Simulator in similarly granular detail. Call it the rest of the explanation of why I too have given those genres short shrift in these histories.

Nevertheless, said histories do try to capture the landscape of gaming as it was viewed at the time, not just the nostalgic, fannish perspective of today. Sports games and vehicular simulations were a huge part of that landscape, representing as much as 40 percent of the market at times during the 1980s and 1990s. So, today I’ll try to remedy my neglect at least a little bit, by tracing aspirational driving games back to their point of origin. (Sports game will have to wait for another day.) This will lead us nicely into a big exception to the general rule I’ve just belabored at such length: the one vintage driving game that I actually do dig, even today.

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The exception to another rule, that of me ignoring driving sims in the past, is a game called Test Drive, to which I devoted a handful of paragraphs many years ago. Developed by a Vancouver-based outfit called Distinctive Software and published by Accolade in 1987, Test Drive was a fine place to break my silence on the subject of driving sims, however briefly, in that it was arguably the most important such game ever to appear on personal computers. I say this not because it generated enormous sales — it was a big success by the standards of its time, but later driving sims would sell many, many times more copies — but because it was the template for countless games to come. For it introduced the driving sim as an aspirational lifestyle product, almost as much an exercise in branding and promotion for the car makers whose vehicles were included as it was a self-contained game.

Test Drive offered up five of the cars whose posters could be found stuck to the wall in teenage-male bedrooms from sea to shining sea: a Porsche 911 Turbo, a Ferrari Testarossa, a Lotus Esprit Turbo, a Lamborghini Countach, and (for those with slightly less exotic tastes) a Chevrolet Corvette. You got to pick one of these cars, then drive it up a twisting mountain road as quickly as possible, dodging slower traffic and trying to stay ahead of the police cars who were in somewhat inept pursuit. The meta-game that took place when you weren’t behind the steering wheel extended no further than trying to get your time on a high-scores list. It wasn’t much in comparison to what these games would become — but it was enough. You got the chance to drive a car you weren’t likely to ever even ride in, and you got to do it in all the reckless ways that only a maniac would in real life. For the car manufacturers, being featured in sleek and stylish games like this one would soon become an important promotional strategy, creating the customers of tomorrow from the teenagers of today. It was an early step in gaming’s integration into the larger consumer economy, one which happened at almost the same time that sports games began to move toward a season-by-season model that kept them in tune with the latest headlines on ESPN.

The bona fides of games like these as simulations was a case of a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, you didn’t want to make the cars too dauntingly difficult to drive, in the way of so many hardcore flight simulations — or for that matter some hardcore motorsports simulations, such as Papyrus Design’s IndyCar and NASCAR series. On the other hand, you wanted to ensure that the player could tell the difference between a Countach and a Corvette. You wanted to convey the impression of what it would be like to drive a supercar, in a way that remained accessible even to kids who might not have a driver’s license for the family minivan yet. Michael Bate, a designer for Artech, another Canada-based studio whose works were published by Accolade during the 1980s, called games hewing to this impressionistic philosophy “aesthetic simulations,” a neologism I’ve returned to again and again ever since I first heard it. Hanno Lemke, the producer of Test Drive, describes that game’s goals in classic aesthetic-simulation terms: to “create the most immersive, visceral, and relevant kind of car experiences [emphasis mine] you could imagine.”

When I grew up, it was the white Lamborghini poster in your bedroom or the red Ferrari, and it was very much about [how] the exotics mattered back then. And so, immersion was really important — getting into the driver’s seat, that virtual fantasy, you know. No real-life consequences — I can drive as fast as I want, the cops can chase me, but largely it was all about what it would feel like to drive these exotics.

Accolade published sequels to Test Drive in 1989 and 1990, alongside separate boxed add-ons with new cars to try out and scenery to traverse, thereby pioneering the model of the driving game as an entire ecosystem you bought into. (Today, that model is driven by the ubiquitous DLC packs.) By Test Drive III: The Passion, other staples of modernity were creeping in as well, such as the ability to rewatch and share your exploits after a particularly good (or bad) run and even a radio where you could select your own station, although we were still a long way from the times when bands and singers would lobby almost as aggressively as car companies to have their music included in such products.

Despite its innovations, the third game was not as well-reviewed or well-received as the ones before. Accolade had developed this installment in-house instead of letting Distinctive do it; this may be the reason that many gamers found it to be lacking a certain ineffable feel for the road. Then, too, some of the design choices were just weird: Test Drive III made keeping your windshield clear of bugs into a central aspect of its gameplay. The franchise effectively ended here, not to be revived until years later, as an also-ran rather than a pioneer.

The third game’s shortcomings notwithstanding, if you’ve played or even seen any of the modern driving sims, and try out any one of these Test Drive games today, you’ll immediately sense the same vibe, even if you are less impressed by the implementation. That’s a remarkable thing to contemplate all these decades later. For all that gaming has changed, it’s amazing how much it’s stayed the same in some of its core genres.

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Distinctive was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1991. The new EA Canada focused more than ever on, for lack of a better term, “lifestyle games.” Being Canadian, it was given responsibility for creating the annual installments of the EA Sports National Hockey League franchise in the exploding console-game space. It has continued to this day to crank out a new edition every single year: 34 installments and counting as of this writing. This must surely be a record of some sort.

Driving games soon returned to the agenda as well. EA negotiated a deal with Road & Track, a slick magazine that sold an only modestly more grounded version of the fantasy of fast cars with expensive price tags than had Test Drive. Hanno Lemke was put in charge of Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, with many of the same people who had helped him build Test Drive working under him. It was to be a launch title for the 3DO, a new games console cum “multimedia appliance” whose finances were thoroughly muddled up with those of EA: Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA, had left that company with his board’s blessing and plenty of their investment dollars to embark on this new venture. The 3DO was envisioned as a sort of lifestyle console, appealing to an older demographic than the likes of Nintendo and Sega. It requires no great imaginative leap to understand why a game like The Need for Speed could be a good fit with that vision. If all went according to plan, the same people who perused Road & Track might soon be picking up 3DOs.

The 3DO’s not-so-secret weapon was to be the CDs on which all of its games would ship. These CDs would in turn enable lots and lots of digitized video and sound sourced from the real world, a possibility which would have seemed like science fiction just a few years earlier. The Need for Speed embraced said possibility with all the enthusiasm that was expected of a 3DO game; you didn’t see a computer-drawn car on your screen until you settled down into the driver’s seat of one.

The video clips were typical of the era — which is to say, amazing simply for existing at the time of the game’s release in 1994, but ho-hum at best today. The worst decision was to add a shakily acted fellow named Mr. X to serve as the player’s antagonist, popping up from time to time with some trash talk. This was exactly as grating as it sounds like it would be, especially after you had seen him deliver every one of his limited repertoire of one-liners multiple (dozen?) times.

The means of production of all this video reflected the fact that the games industry, for all its rapid evolution, still had a ways to go before it would be competing on a level field with Hollywood. EA didn’t even have the clout to borrow cars from the manufacturers whose vehicles were included. So, Hanno Lemke and his friends had to go begging. Luckily, Road & Track had whole filing cabinets full of still photographs of the cars in question that were ripe for digitizing. In the category of the moving image, the Ferrari Testarossa seen in the video clips belonged to Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame, the Lamborghini Diablo to Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, and the Porsche 911 to an EA Canada executive. Other cars were scavenged by still more humble methods, being vehicles that the team simply spotted driving by and chased down to ask the owners if they were interested in making a cameo appearance in a videogame.

Once you got past all of the multimedia-age gilding, however, you found a very credible aesthetic simulation waiting for you. The Need for Speed reinvented no wheels; it was a recapitulation of Test Drive on a larger canvas, right down to the vaguely hapless cops who lay in wait to chase you down public highways. Once again, you had a selection of mouth-watering sports cars to hand, updated to reflect the latest developments in the field. (This time, the Japanese got a chance: no fewer than three of the eight cars — the Mazda RX-7, the Toyota Supra, and the Acura NSX — came from the Land of the Rising Sun.) But it was all done better, reflecting the seven years of steady technological advancement that separated The Need for Speed from the original Test Drive.

The game nailed the look and feel it was going for. No one would accuse this of being a hardcore simulation of driving — not when you could bump and bash and grind against the other vehicles with impunity, when even crashing head-on at speed into the side of a building resulted in little visible damage to the car. (This was a requirement of the contracts with the manufacturers, who had no desire to see their halo vehicles getting smashed up and exploding on screens; such requirements are still the rule in the contracts of today.) Even the non-police computerized drivers you could race against — another advancement over Test Drive — were more interested in showing you a good time and keeping the adrenaline level up than they were in earnestly trying to win. As one reviewer put it, “the AI drivers don’t race; they shadow.”

The point was that it was fun, being just close enough — but not too close — to what racing cars such as these might really be like. The game presented an alternative universe where you could not only afford a supercar, but one where insurance premiums didn’t exist and the police would give you no more than a ticket and a stern talking-to if they caught you driving 170 miles per hour down a heavily trafficked road. This was a universe that teenage boys everywhere — even the ones who happened to be in their twenties, thirties, forties or fifties — could well and truly get behind.

But sadly for everyone involved, the 3DO console was a marketplace flop. On the supply side, a scheme for renting out the console’s specifications and firmware to multiple consumer-electronics makers proved a recipe for confusion, while the slightly older folks who wanted to play multimedia videogames in their living rooms of an evening in lieu of watching television proved rather less plentiful than anticipated. Still believing they had a good thing on their hands, one which was just on the wrong platform at the moment, EA Canada reworked The Need for Speed for ordinary personal computers. This allowed them to turn it into the biggest game ever to be born on Trip Hawkins’s misbegotten console.

Released in 1995, this incarnation of The Need for Speed dialed back on the most annoying aspects of the 3DO version — Mr. X got the well-deserved axe — while keeping everything that had made it appealing. In its review, Computer Gaming World magazine made note of the tightrope it walked with such aplomb: “Realistic elements are usually compromised for the sake of a quick learning curve and blazing arcade action. But Need for Speed is kind of an anomaly: it borrows some from both styles and thrills the senses along the way.” It became a huge hit on personal computers. It was then ported to the Sony PlayStation, a new CD-based console which had set out to do much of what the 3DO had, and would pull it off much better. The Need for Speed took off there as well. Indeed, in some ways games like these were always more natural fits for consoles.

So, out of the smoking rubble of the 3DO, a long-running driving-game franchise arose. Need for Speed II came out in 1997. Along with the definite article in the name, it dropped the Road & Track partnership; EA now had more than enough clout to get all of the glamor shots and test models it could want from the manufacturers. Some complained that the advancement was all in the department of graphics and sound, but that was fine for most fans of this most deeply experiential of all gaming genres. “Little details like hearing the shift click mattered back then,” says Hanno Lemke, who would continue to act as the franchise’s primary producer until 2007. “Watching the dials move mattered.” (There is a reason that I like to call these games aesthetic simulations.)

The series was moving now toward an annual release schedule, just like the sports games. In that spirit of ongoing perpetuity, Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, which came out in 1998, was the last installment with a Roman numeral and the first with a subtitle. To further press home the notion of Need for Speed as a subculture you bought into rather than a single game you bought, EA began to regularly put up new, downloadable content — most importantly, new supercars to add to the ever-growing list of same — on its website.

In a decision which was polarizing in some circles but doubtless exhaustively market-researched, this installment leaned further toward the arcade game at the expense of the simulation. As its subtitle would imply, it heavily emphasized the police-chase aspect. The cops, who had verged on being little more than props at times in the past, could now go so far as to set up roadblocks ahead of you, complete with tire spikes. But, as Computer Gaming World’s reviewer captured, the core attributes of the aspirational lifestyle game, as deft at promoting the cars it featured as it was at being good fun in its own right, remained as pronounced as ever.

During the time I was writing this review, I went driving in the mountains. As I cruised along narrow, twisting roads, I kept thinking about how much the experience reminded me of playing Need for Speed III — at least as far as handling the car went. I wasn’t being chased by the police, and I wasn’t pushing my Lamborghini much past 60 miles per hour. Okay, so I don’t own a Lamborghini. But after playing this game, I sure wish that I did.

Need for Speed: High Stakes appeared right on time in 1999. In order to give the Buford T. Justices of the world some redemption, it let you become the police instead of forever being chased by them. But the less gimmicky, vastly more significant addition was that of a career mode, which finally provided a proper meta-game to bridge and give context to your exploits on the highways and raceways. You started with only enough money to buy what passed for a budget car in this august assemblage: a Mercedes SLK or a BMW Z3. You had to earn your way into the more exclusive rides by winning ever more challenging tournaments, whilst keeping your repair bills to a minimum in the process. High Stakes wasn’t quite the first aspirational driving game to introduce a career mode — that distinction belongs to Gran Turismo, a PlayStation-exclusive competitor — but it was a huge step forward nonetheless. Suddenly the individual races had… well, high stakes, that extended beyond the moment-to-moment maneuvering on the road, that might even cause you to exercise a modicum of caution out there from time to time. And as you progressed, you slowly amassed a garage full of tricked-out, exotic sports cars. I trust that I’ve flogged my hobby horse sufficiently by now to not have to tell you what this meant for these games as aspirational lifestyle products.

All of this was great, if you were interested in buying what these games were so explicitly selling. I must confess that I really wasn’t, even back in the day. The cars that were featured weren’t generally the ones I lusted after, and I found the whole presentation a bit too boy-racer for my tastes. But then Need for Speed took a surprising detour — one that would prove a bit of a blind alley for the franchise, but one that I enjoyed immensely. I’ll tell you all about that next time.

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Sources: Edge of October 1994; Retro Gamer 59 and 178; Computer Gaming World of February 1988, April 1991, November 1995, August 1997, March 1998, and January 1999; the Harvard Business School case studies “Electronic Arts in 1995,” “Electronic Arts in 2002,” and “Electronic Arts: The Blockbuster Strategy.”

Online sources include “A Distinctive Lineage” by Chris LaVigne for The Escapist, “How Need for Speed Became the World’s Biggest Racing Game” by Mack Hogan for Road & Track, and an interview with Hanno Lemke conducted by John Davison for 1UP.com.

Where to Get Them: Unfortunately, none of the games discussed here are available for legal purchase, presumably due to the expiration of the various licensing agreements with automobile manufacturers. It’s another reason that these sorts of games are so easily forgotten by history…