The second part of our series on Need for Speed community fansites continues today with the first up being Sander Prinsen, the founder of NFSCars.net, a site that encourages people to go wild with their best NFS car ideas.
How long have you been running your fansite? I am not the current webmaster, but the original founder of NFSCars. It was founded in March, 2000, so almost 10 years ago now. By the end of 2004, I handed over the site to it's current webmaster, Mike Geise.
What made you want to make the effort and create your site? Back in early 2000, the most recent NFS was High Stakes. There was a lot of user created content for that game (and it's predecessor Hot Pursuit) in the form of cars, tracks and other mods. As the name of the site suggests, I wanted to offer a site where people could easily download the cars created in the community. The idea was to gather most if not all cars available. Dozens over cars quickly became hundreds and later thousands of cars available, which greatly exceeded all my expectations.
What is about Need for Speed that gets you excited? I used to play a lot of racegames back in my youth. Games like Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge and Test Drive (the originals) were my favorites. But then came The Need For Speed, which was unlike any racegame I had ever seen. I had to have it and so I did. Played it for weeks or months, couldn't get enough of it. And so my love for the NFS games started. It's the combination of great cars, tracks, game types, gameplay and up-to-date graphics, so basicly the whole package.
What was the best car ever to feature in the games? That's a good question, there have been so many. Each NFS game has it's great cars, but if I had to pick one, it had to be the Ferrari 512tr from the very first NFS game. It's what I remember first if I think back to my NFS history.
If you could go back any play any track in any Need for Speed which one would it be? I loved the Zone Industrial track in Porsche Unleashed. The game had amazing tracks anyway and still remains to be one of my favorite NFS games of all time.
Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future? I'd like to see another Hot Pursuit edition, including a Be The Cop mode and including all major supercar manufacturers (including Ferrari, which has been missing from NFS for a while now unfortunately).
The folks at NFSCars were nice enough to include two screenshots of their site, one from 2001 and the second from 2009.
Next, we spoke to Bojan Puschner from NFSUnlimited.net, whose site is apparently is powered by squirrels with nuts.
How long have you been running your fansite? I actually started with a NFS fansite at times of NFS High Stakes (1999) but after some problems with website hosts it got deleted and I created a new site called NFSUnlimited back in 2000 as a Need for Speed Porsche fansite. From then on it got bigger after every game release and the final result is what you can see today.
What made you want to make the effort and create your site? I really loved the NFS series (started with TNFSSE) and I was in a phase when I wanted to have my own website. Creating a Need for Speed fansite was an easy decision :)
What is about Need for Speed that gets you excited? I'd have to say the sense of speed which has been amazing in every game. Then there's the cool cars and tracks and we have a series to which I've been addicted to since the start.
What was the best car ever to feature in the games? I'm gonna go with the McLaren F1, the best car in NFS2 and High Stakes with a great comeback in the recent games. It's a 1994 car still up to par with the modern cars!
If you could go back any play any track in any Need for Speed which one would it be? That's a hard choice because there's been so many good tracks in the series! I've always been more of a fan of point to point tracks so I'm gonna go with the Alps track from NFS Porsche: it started with a climb up some hairpins, through a tunnel into a snowed in area (with slippery snowy road), then slowly downhill with the road turning dry again. The change of surface made it really challenging and the scenery was amazing!
Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future? I have to admit that I like the direction the series are going now: a sim racer this year with SHIFT, then next year an action/arcade title then maybe back into sim in 2 years... With a bit more focus on the quality and post release support and the series could get back to the top in the racing genre.
Next, we spoke to Carsten Alsemgeest from nfsfreaks.nl, the top Dutch Need for Speed website. He has also run several other NFS fansites that focused on specific titles.
How long have you been running your fansite?
We are running nfsmostwanted.nl from October 2005. Each year we had a new site: nfsmostwanted.nl / nfscarbon.nl / nfsprostreet.nl / nfs-undercover.nl. This year we decided to start a website that is preservable for more than 1 year, the site is nfsfreaks.nl
What made you want to make the effort and create your site? I really like to design and create websites. At my first trainee period I had much time left. I read about NFS MW coming up, so I started a site in the time at my trainee period.
I started to develop a CMS (that's used today for more than 50 websites) for the site and the team grow. Today I still like to create websites, develop web applications and I'm very interested in online communities and social media. It's even my job in real life.
What is about Need for Speed that gets you excited?
I get excited about the exotic cars, the great tracks and the police.
What was the best car ever to feature in the games?
It's difficult to pick one car, but I think it's the Lamborghini Diablo SV or the Lamborghini Countach, both from NFS Hot Pursuit.
If you could go back any play any track in any Need for Speed which one would it be?
The track that I would play again is the Autobahn from Porsche 2000. I really enjoyed that track with my Porsche 911 Turbo.
Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future?
I would like to see Need for Speed go back to the "Hot Pursuit area" but with a lot of renewal like what EA did with the driver experience in SHIFT. Exotic tracks, exotic cars and police. That's Need for Speed for me.
Here are a couple shots of sites Carsten has created for ProStreet and Most Wanted.
How long have you been running your fansite? I started my first forum with a help from a friend just in time for Need for Speed Carbon in October 2006. So, that's about 3 years ago.
What made you want to make the effort and create your site? Well, I had been moderating EA's NFS Forums for a while and when we learned there was going to be crews in NFS Carbon, I decided to create my own crew. One of my first members made the message board for our crew. The crew was originally called Euro Tuning Car Club, but I changed it to International Street Racing Community before ProStreet.
What is about Need for Speed that gets you excited? Need for Speed Porsche was one of the first 3D racing games I ever played. It was so far ahead of it's time with it's performance and visual customizing features that I just fell in love with it and with the whole series.
What was the best car ever to feature in the games? This may sound funny, but to me it must still be the 1972 Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7L from that first NFS game I ever played.
If you could go back any play any track in any Need for Speed which one would it be? It would either be a Corsica track from NFS Porsche or that one track in the first NFS Underground where you got to jump the bridge.
Where would you like to see Need for Speed go in the future? I am really exited about World Online, but I am still waiting for the title that would combine street and track racing like Underground 2 did. Visual customization is very important to me, do not ever lose that. It has beed a trademark for the series for so long now.
