One of the greatest things about working on Need for Speed is that you get to deal with some of the greatest fans in videogames.

We’re lucky to have a fantastic set of fans who spend their own time and money to build fansites to support and build the Need for Speed gaming community. As we celebrate the amazing 100m sales we thought it wouldn’t be right unless we gave a shout out to our fansites to say thank you for all your effort.

Here, then, is a series of articles featuring some of our favourite sites and forum mods detailing how they got involved with NFS, what their site is all about and how you can get involved.

First up, we have Jakub Kosnar, from needforspeed.sk, the top NFS site in Slovakia. He spoke with Global Community Manager Andrew Collins.

How long have you been running your fansite?

My site first went online in December 2003. So today it's nearly 6 years.

What made you want to make the effort and create your site?

I had been running a GTA: Vice City fansite when NFS: Underground came out. The game was really fun so I decided to make fansite about it too. Then I've started to enjoy working on this site very much, so I focused only on NFS and my GTA fansite was given to another guy.

What is it about Need for Speed that gets you excited?

It must be the sense of speed that the game offers. I have never played any racing game with the same feeling of the speed. Also the really huge carlist is something that I love about each NFS, I like to try as many different cars as possible.

What was the best car to be featured in an NFS game?

It's Porsche 959 from NFS: Porsche Unleashed. Very rare car in real world, and also the game required download from the EA website before it appeared in garage.

If you could go back and play any NFS track, which one would it be?

It would be some track from NFS3; Summit and Aquatica were my favourite ones.

Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future?

I would like to see rebirth of good old pursuit game modes with many police cars, police radio, tickets, spike strips and some new co-operative features.

Next, we spoke to Christopher Trum from NFS-Mania.com, the first French Need for Speed fansite.

How long have you been running your fansite?
I started 4 years ago with nfs-mania.com as a simple news publisher. With the time, the original webmaster lost interest in Need for Speed, so I took over the website. At the beginning there were not many visitors, but four years later we are now the first website about Need for Speed in French and we are really proud of that.

What made you want to make the effort and create your site?
At the beginning I wrote topics on a big French forum. I started with Need for Speed Underground 2 because I felt that the person who held the topic of the previous NFS didn't do the job properly. So I began to make something like a Blog with news, picture and any relevant information about the game.

I continued with Most Wanted and at that moment the ex-webmaster got in touch with me, he wanted me to put the information of my topic on the website. I accepted, on the condition was that I first publish my news on the forum. Then I gradually did more and more work for the nfs-mania and less for the forum. With Need for Speed Carbon I worked only for the website.

What is about Need for Speed that gets you excited?
I started with NFS Hot Pursuit 2 as it was the only game of that type on PC. Thereafter with Underground and Underground 2, they were the only games with deep tuning possibility, so I became a real fan of the franchise.

What was the best car ever to feature in the games?
I don't know if there is a "best car", but I always loved the Lamborghinis, especially the Diablo.

If you could go back any play any track in any Need for Speed which one would it be?
As I said, I started very late with Need for Speed, but I loved some tracks of Hot Pursuit 2 in the forests or in the mountains. I also like the little part in NFSU where the streets look like the ones in San Francisco.

Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future?
Even if Need for Speed Shift is a great game, I would like to see the open road reintegrated. With a much more variety of decors (like along the beach, in the forest, snow-covered roads in the mountains...). It is probably a good alternative to switch between the two styles (one year simulation style like Shift and the other more arcade, like Most Wanted).

The next person we spoke to was Josh Allen from Racerplanet.com.

How long have you been running your fansite?
A long time.

Actually I had to go look up when I registered the domain names. I started out with a website back in mid 1999 called NFS Index and tried to (partially successfully) track all the user created cars on all the different websites in one place.

I didn't quite know what I was doing back then and it quickly became defunct after Total NFS was created in the november of 1999. There was a group of us the started the website/forum community, many of us are still around at Racerplanet and the Total NFS website although now defunct still exists online at www.totalnfs.net if anyone is curious.

Racerplanet itself was founded in April of 2001 and has gone thru many different iterations. I intentionally used the same forum as TotalNFS to keep the user base and community the same. Over the years as people moved on I ended up hosting TotalNFS and many other websites over the years on my own webservers. So I guess you can say I've been doing fansites for around 10 years and my first NFS community day was NFS Underground back in 2003.

What made you want to make the effort and create your site?
I guess I was interested in web programming and websites back in my college years and I enjoyed racing NFS HS and NFS PU online in their online "betas". I've played every NFS game since it came out and when I found the online community back in the days of NFS HS I eventually created my own site and community.

What is about Need for Speed that gets you excited?
My favorite part has always been the online racing, I even started a racing team/clan back in the NFS PU days. We had a large number of teams racing for fun and even a few tournaments and leaderboard battles back then.

What was the best car ever to feature in the games?
I would have to say the Ferrari F50, that was by far my favorite car in NFS HS. Even though it was not in the top tier of cars that time, behind the McLaren F1 and the Mercedes CLK GTR if I remember correctly, I would still race it up against those cars on many of the tracks and sometimes even come away with a win even.

If you could go back any play any track in any Need for Speed which one would it be?
I really like some of the original tracks from the first few games Autumn Valley or maybe one of the snowy mountain tracks

Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future?
Online! I've been trying for years to get NFS to focus and exploit online racing more. There's been a lot of missed opportunities with online racing and clans in a lot of the past NFS games, but I'm very glad to hear we might be headed in the right direction with some of the things we will be seeing in NFS World Online.

Josh was also kind enough to include two screenshots of the evolution of Racerplanet, the first from 2001 and second from 2006.

And finally today, we have the interview with Bernhard Schmidt from NFSPlanet.com, which is available in both German and English.

How long have you been running your fansite?
NFS-Planet started with NFS Porsche in the year 2000. There were some variations of the website before, but it started getting serious in 2000.

What made you want to make the effort and create your site?
Well, at first it started as a hobby, to get in touch with web development. I had fun designing the website, creating flash animations and programming an administration interface.

The NFS series motivated me in many ways, to always extend and rebuild the website, so NFS-Planet grew with each NFS release over the years. It's a never-ending project.

What is about Need for Speed that gets you excited?
Every game has it's unique features and innovations, which always draw me back to Need for Speed. In its early years that was police, graphics and AI. In the latest titles it was Autosculpt, the Story in MW, the Cockpit View in Shift and the excitement for racing in general. Need for Speed had its ups and downs, but basically almost each year it delivers a great racing experience.

What was the best car ever to feature in the games?
It's hard to say, I don't really have a "favorite car", so I'm always glad when I can drive an upper-class car. I guess one of my favorite cars is the Lamborghini Murciélago. :)

If you could go back any play any track in any Need for Speed which one would it be?
Unfortunately the latest NFS titles didn't feature such unique tracks as in the first NFS games (until NFS Porsche). I think Pyrenees was one of my favorite tracks in NFS Porsche. Wide landscapes, sunshine, vineyards...very nice. The Alps was a great track too - I loved the feeling when going through a tunnel and when you come out suddenly everything is covered in snow.

Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future?
Need for Speed is a series, that can be (and was) very different with every title. The main (and only) condition is the "need for speed", together with powerful licensed cars, so everything is possible.

Although I liked the latest turn to realism with NFS Shift very much, I'm still hoping for an NFS more like Porsche Unleashed or High Stakes. The concept of being a test driver for Porsche was an exciting experience, as well as the police chases on country roads in High Stakes. Maybe there's a possibility to combine those two - I think this would be an NFS after my fancy (maybe with additional online features like in NFS World Online, although I didn't have a chance to play this title yet).

Stay tuned tomorrow for part two.