The Fast and The Furious franchise is a joke nowadays, but the first movie was genuinely decent, and that first race in it was something special. Nobody had filmed race scenes that way. Apparently, the guys at Black Box felt the same and tried to recapture the experience. Did they succeed?

A resounding yes!

Night city drenched in neon light, colorful cars breathing fire through their exhaust pipes, smoke and water particles up in the air, the streets disappearing in the blur. When Need for Speed: Underground came out, it was more than a racing game. It was an experience.

It was the first exemplar of the genre I can recall that wasn’t just about winning races. Your personally customized car represented who you were and, as you progressed through the campaign, it would level up, like in an RPG. That added a whole new level of immersion, making the player an active part of the in-game world, instead of just a guest who comes in from time to time for a quick driving session. You owned your car not just in the sense of possession, but also in the sense of embracing what it represented.

And that world you were entering, the titular “Underground” had its own culture that manifested both in style and gameplay. Drift and drag races were rather unique game modes that had you utilizing a whole different set of skills that you normally wouldn’t in other racing games, but on top they represented the main artistic influences of the game even better than the regular racing modes and were arguably more fun. Scoring combos in the drift mode is super addictive and there’s an incredible amount of mechanical depth to it in that your car is gonna react differently to when you start turning, when you hit the brake, how long you hold it, etc., and you can pull off different combos with that. Every drift session will feel different on each playthrough. However, I suppose to a lesser degree the same can be said about practically all game modes in NFSU because of the amount of variables that have been introduced.

The tracks are predominantly designed in a similar way to Hot Pursuit 2, having plenty of shortcuts that may or may not do you more harm than good. It’s always a risk that you have to consider. But now there’s also the traffic, which a lot of people hate. I’m not gonna pretend like it’s not frustrating to fail a race at the last moment because a random car blindsided me in such a way that I had zero chance of avoiding it. But I think these moments should be weighed against all the instances when you almost magically glide between several cars and don’t get hit, feeling like a racing Neo that just dodged a few bullets. The traffic gives the game this unpredictability that increases the adrenaline and the feeling of reward you get from winning.

One aspect that comes up a lot is the rubber-banding, which is admittedly a little excessive in this game, but I would argue that this type of gameplay wouldn’t work without it. There is actually a mod that disables it, and I have tried it, and it makes the game brutal. Because out of every ~4 opponents the game throws at you, there’s always gonna be one or two that are faster than you. When you have a racing game where cars can be improved, it’s very hard to maintain a balance of difficulty, unless you make every opponent have similar upgrades to you, which in a way defeats the point of upgrades. Rubber-banding is a solution that allows to retain the sense of progression while gently adjusting the difficulty. In later games, it would be tweaked to feel much more organic.

It’s always hard to return to an older game once the sequels have improved its formula, and I think this can also be felt with the nitro, which in the later games would become replenishable, being the last puzzle piece in completing the formula in the same vein as Call of Duty did with the replenishable health. Same can be said about the campaign, that feels rather simplistic compared to what Most Wanted and Carbon would do. It’s basically just a series of races with almost redundant cutscenes that lack the charm and character of the later games.

But really, back in 2003 none of us thought of what this game COULD be, as we were absolutely enthralled by what it WAS. I’ve never really been a big fan of the racing genre, but this game stood out from the rest with its unique gameplay and style. The motion blur when you’re driving at high speeds and the world just disappears around you while ADF’s Fortress Europe is blasting in the background, the feeling was unprecedented. And many years later, despite now recognizing some gameplay flaws, the magic of it all is still overpowering.