As Need For Speed turns 30, the devs currently running the series say the biggest challenge new entries face is "literally the age of the franchise"

“I remember going to what was probably the local video game shop or computer shop, and me and my friends saw it on the 3DO, and we were like ‘what’s this?’, we all jumped on it, and you felt badass,” current Need For Speed producer Patrick Honnoraty says. “Being able to drive it, being chased by the cops, there wasn’t an experience that was really like it at the time.”

Since the release of that game - The Need for Speed or Road and Track presents: The Need For Speed if you want to stick to what’s on the box art - in 1994, the racing genre has evolved to a place no one could really have predicted back then. Not least me, as I write this, given I’d not be born for another half a decade or so.

But Need For Speed has stuck around, and next month, it hits the milestone of turning 30 years old. That’s 30 years of changing and evolving in different ways, some inevitably more well-received by players than others, a sentiment that isn’t lost on the current and former NFS developers who spoke at a recent 30th anniversary roundtable attended by VG247.

“The trajectory has been bumpy actually, in some cases,” Honnoraty acknowledges, “but what’s happened and I think what’s been most important is that if you think about the first inception of what The Need For Speed was, it was really accessible, really easy.”

He continues that in his estimation, Need For Speed’s “really tried to stay true to that formula” established by the original. “It’s still accessible today, a lot of car racing games are not so easily accessible, so people still have the option to jump into a Need For Speed game.” Another important factor in the devs’ eyes is staying relevant to the ever-changing trends of car culture, with Honnoraty saying: “It’s [vehicle artists like] Bryn [Alban] and Frankie [Yip]’s job all the time to be looking at what’s happening, and upcoming trends, and trying to include that back into the game.

“I’d say in [Need For Speed’s] trajectory of its ups and downs, it’s probably been at some of its worst times when those things have been removed actually,” he adds, “When customisation has not found its way into the priorities that we’ve set, and it’s been removed from the game, I think the game’s suffered in those times when we had that.”

That’s the thing though, as the series has grown and changed over time - from those earliest joyrides to the noughties street racing romps of Underground and Most Wanted, then on to trying some different stuff with games like Prostreet, The Run and the Shifts, before moving into its latest era that’s seen development move from Criterion to Ghost Games and then back to Criterion - it’s become a lot of things in the eyes of an awful lot of players. So where does that leave it in November 2024?

“I think today the biggest challenge we face is literally the age of the franchise, and what it’s been,” Honnoraty says. “It’s been so many different things and appeals to so many different people that we even see the debates between players [as to] which is the best game, and why is it the best game.

“I’ll give you an example. When we had Need For Speed Payback at EA Play, we had people on the booth, people would jump [in] and they would play the highway heist. They would come off the booth and I’d be like ‘How was it?’, and they’d be like ‘Oh man, that reminds me of Most Wanted, that was amazing’ and then [other] people would come up and go ‘Oh man, that reminded me of Underground, it was so good’. I’m like ‘How? What? They’re totally different!’

“So, I think it’s just people carry with them the feeling that they had when they played those games. Some of them skipped ones and then came back for others. I think that’s the hardest thing today, is honestly reconciling what Need For Speed means to players, and you’ve seen it - when we go in one direction with something [and] it doesn’t quite work, it doesn’t appeal to certain sorts of players, and we go in another direction. It’s a real thing that we have to tackle, day-in, day-out. John [Stanley, Criterion senior creative director] and I work with it constantly,” Honnoraty concludes, joking: “We think we’ve nearly cracked it.”

“It means so much to so many different people and everybody’s got a different opinion as to what a good Need For Speed is,” adds vehicle art director Bryn Alban. “So, trying to appease everybody at all times is super difficult, even down to the nitty-gritty details of what customisation we put on our cars. It’s so divisive a subject for our players that it’s almost impossible for us to get it 100% right all the time.”

While listening to that spread of vocal and passionate fan viewpoints and opinions is clearly important for developers working on the series, long-time NFS developer, Justin Wiebe - currently a studio design director at Battlefield studio Ripple Effect - says it’s not just a case of trying to blindly make something that the pleases every potential player with each entry. Especially with a series that for a while had annual - or near annual - releases.

“I think for me, one of the largest learnings and challenges is that if you try to make something for everyone, what you wind up doing is watering it down and making something for nobody in particular,” he says, “So, you really do have to be ruthless with your vision and say ‘We are going to take this component, this part of what people love about Need For Speed and we’re going to bring it to the next level’.

“Then [it’s about] what does that mean, and we’re looking, we know that other people are going to miss X, Y and Z, because that’s what Need For Speed is for them. So, are we ok with that? How do we massage it? How do we manage the message for what this particular Need For Speed is gonna be about? I’ll go back to my experience on Prostreet, which, as we say, talk about taking risks - let’s take Need For Speed off the streets, out of the open world, let’s make it sanctioned on racetracks in professional sporting events, and say ‘This is your Need For Speed’.

“People are like ‘What about the story, what about the cops, what about this?’ It’s like ‘Yes, we understand those aren’t there, but we made a decision, we want to go big, we want to bring car culture to sanctioned racing tracks, and that was the vision for this year’s Need For Speed’. That’s the hardest thing, is to make these decisions that we know are going to be polarising for players, but that we believe is best for that particular product in that moment in time.”

Naturally, this is something the most recent entries in the series - and the ones that’ll inevitably follow them as it accelerates on into the next 30 years - continue to grapple with in the quest to keep on evolving what a Need For Speed game can be.

“Even in my time recently,” Honnoraty says, “We did a kind of version of Hot Pursuit [with] Rivals, we then changed and we kinda went back to a re-imagining of what would Underground look like today, bringing back customisation, we even then looked at focusing on a very much more action-oriented game [with Payback].

“Then [we] moulded some of those things together to create something like Heat, brough in Heat’s idea of risk [vs] reward and doubled down on it for Unbound to create the calendar system. So, it’s always re-inventing, always trying to pick the ideas that make what you do with these vehicles interesting. Something that’s slightly beyond the racing, but the racing is always still at the core of what they are.

“I think that’s what we’ve done, for good and for bad, because those things [being] risks, they don’t always work and they don’t always resonate with players, but you’ll guarantee we will always be doing something different.”