NFSDrew's Time On Need for Speed - Pre-EA & The First Years at EA

Submitted by Drew Hahn on Thu, 2009-10-22 17:23

 

I first started at Electronic Arts back in May 2002 as a game tester.  The first game I worked on was NHL 2003, specifically, testing the online components of the game.  Because of my web development background I was somewhat of an expert on "online".  After working on sports titles for a year and a bit I was asked to help out Need for Speed Underground (the original Underground) with testing the online components of the game...

Actually, let me step back a little bit.  I've been a gamer all my life.  So much in fact that my friends and family used to call me the "game genie" because any game I picked up I was immediately good at.  My friends stopped playing me in games all together because they couldn't win (sore losers).  The first time I ever saw a Need for Speed game was when NFS Hot Pursuit first came out.  I stopped by a friend's place and he was playing NFS HP.  I walked in and was like "What game is that?!?".  After he told me it was NFS HP I just pushed him out of the way, sat down and started playing.  I played for so long that when I finally looked away from the screen I found that my buddy had left his place leaving me playing the game.  I called him up and he said "You were so zoned out.  I got bored and left to pick some things up".  Ha ha...good times.

While I was testing the sports titles Hot Pursuit 2 was in development and I played a lot of it.  I don't know if you guys knew this but HP2 was actually developed by two separate teams.  One team worked exclusively on the PlayStation2 version and another team worked on the Xbox & PC versions.  That's why you see certain features (like the optimal racing line) on one console and not the other.  Another interesting fact about NFS HP2 was that the tracks in that game took a long time to design.  Like 8 - 12 months...they had to be perfect!  If you ask me I think they delivered.  I played HP2 to death!  100% finished the game and loved every minute of it but my fondest memory of HP2 were the hilarious commercials they put out.  Here are a few:

 

 

 

 

 

 The donut one was my favorite.

So after I started at EA and got onto the Need for Speed titles I never left.  As I was saying above, I started working on NFS Underground testing the online components.  When I started testing the online lobby was so buggy that the dev team actually considered shipping Underground without a online lobby.  But after working with the engineers, they managed to get the lobby working properly and the game shipped with an online lobby.  Underground would have online races regardless via LAN games or direct IP games but I think it was better with a lobby.

What attracted me to NFS Underground was that sick opening video.  I'd never seen a racing game with a introduction like that.  Check it out if you don't remember it:

 

 

 

 Underground was one of the best racing games I ever played.  It really played on the whole Tuner culture which was huge at the time because of the Fast & the Furious movie.  But I enjoyed it because the customization was so deep and the racing was pretty intense for the that era in gaming.

After I finished Underground, I was immediately moved onto Underground 2.  In fact I was promoted to senior tester and was put in charge of the online QA team.  I was happy that I got a promotion but I was equally happy that I was now exclusively working on the Need for speed franchise.  The Underground 2 development cycle was an extremely short cycle but the game was still amazing.  In fact it's one of the highest selling Need for Speed's to date.  Testing the game was grueling at times but in the end it was worth it.  I still see people playing online to this day.  All they do is customize their car using the dyno-tuning, go into a race, come back and see if they can make the car better.  I still break it out and play it once and a while.  During development, I used to just drive around the open world for the sake of driving around.  My favorite thing to do was drive up the mountain area and find the best view of the city.  I had a whole bunch of screen shots but I seemed to have lost them over the years.

 

One interesting thing about Underground 2 that most people don't realize is that most of the names of the streets in the game are actually named after streets that exist in Vancouver and Whistler (both in British Columbia, Canada).  Also, if you look at the world map it does have a striking resemblance to the geography of Vancouver.  Interesting eh?

That's it for part one of my time on NFS.  I'll be posting part two tomorrow but for now I'm going to leave you with a couple videos of NFS to watch:

 

 

 

 

 

 

- NFSDrew