Need for Speed: Underground

Need for Speed: Underground was released on PC in 2003 and represented a major turn for the series, away from classic circuit racing toward the nighttime world of street tuning. The player works their way up the street ranking of cities, racing in circuit and sprint races, direct drag race duels, and drift challenges, investing the money earned into visual and performance upgrades for their car — new bumpers, spoilers, paint jobs, neon underglow, or a more powerful engine and turbo. This emphasis on personal identification with the car and its visible transformation became a defining feature of the series for a long time and inspired an entire wave of tuning games that tried to imitate a similar feeling on other platforms in the following years.

Technically, the PC version was built on an engine that was modern for its time, with effective motion blur at high speed and dense night lighting of the streets, giving the races a cinematic, underground character distinct from previous entries in the series set in daylight and on open circuits. The soundtrack, made up of electronic music and nu-metal, underscored the youthful, street atmosphere and became, for many players, an inseparable part of the experience even many years after the game's release. The AI of opponents and the drift physics were tuned more toward arcade than simulation, which made the game accessible to a wide audience regardless of experience with racing games.

Underground became a commercial and critical milestone that steered the series toward tuning themes for more than a decade and inspired a number of competing racing games as well as films connected to street racing and tuning subculture. Today it's seen as a nostalgic reminder of the era of tuning films and turn-of-the-millennium culture, even though its arcade gameplay feels simpler and more straightforward compared to later entries in the series than today's racing games.

Why play it: For lovers of turn-of-the-millennium tuning culture, this is a nostalgic visit to the game that kicked off the entire genre, even though today's players might be caught off guard by its arcade simplicity.