The Digital Antiquarian - 21 Aug 2026

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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.

Mr. X has something to say about your performance. He is aptly described by a contributor to MobyGames as "a face you love to punch."

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.

Speaking of people with punchable faces: Chris Roberts's Ferrari. (I kid! I kid!)

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."

Driving a Dodge Viper, one of the new supercars that had appeared on the scene since Test Drive.

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.

"Balloons ahoy!" in the computer version of The Need for Speed.

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.

The police have upgraded their stodgy cruisers to Camaros in Need for Speed III.

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.

Your garage in High Stakes looks like a car dealer's showroom. This is not a coincidence...

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.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

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...

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/08/a-need-for-speed/