There was a time when any (and I do mean any) brand new Electronic Arts release would generate an outstanding amount of hype, and for a good reason: those games would almost always be bangers, to the point of becoming part of the cultural zeitgeist of the time. Want a good example? Let’s talk about Need for Speed Underground 2, a game that influenced our taste in racing titles, car culture, and even our music tastes. A game which is now twenty years old, believe it or not.

One of the most iconic cars in gaming history. You won’t be able to prove me otherwise.

Two decades ago, 2004 was an oddly beautiful year for pop culture. We were listening to nu metal, pop punk, emo, crunk, and hip hop produced by Scott Storch. The Fast and the Furious was out in theaters, back when those movies were solely about tuning. MTV’s Pimp My Ride, presented by Xzibit, was one of the hottest shows on TV. Need for Speed had just reinvented itself with the first Underground game, the first title in the franchise focused on car tuning, featuring a masterfully curated soundtrack comprised of the aforementioned genres. But Need for Speed Underground 2 took stuff to a whole new level. It was one of the first open world racing games, a revolutionary take on the genre at that point.

Before Need for Speed Underground 2, I can only think of another game which had some kind of open world functionality: Diddy Kong Racing. Calling that game’s (amazing) Adventure mode an “open world” was a stretch, though. It was basically a hub world where you would go from race to race. Need for Speed Underground 2 doesn’t follow this premise. This is an actual open world, fully explorable, with shops to enter, secrets to unveil, cash to collect, and racers to challenge on the fly. Granted, there are also normal racing events scattered throughout the city of Bayview, but almost all of them are set in the same open world map, just with invisible walls and signs to tell you where you can and cannot go.

Hit the nitro!

In essence, Need for Speed Underground 2 laid the groundwork for Forza Horizon, Midnight Club 3, The Crew, and many other games. Its influences can be seen to this day. We can rarely disassociate the Need for Speed brand from tuned cars up to the present day, even though most recent titles in the franchise have tried to deviate from the formula. EA had to revert back to tuned cars with Unbound and Heat in order to regain its relevance. But Need for Speed Underground 2 wouldn’t have been so influential if it wasn’t fun to play. In fact, it still is fun to play, with simple controls and a progression system very few racing games have managed to properly copy to this very day.

The controls and physics were very arcadey. Accelerate, brake (which would automatically trigger a drift), and boost with nitro. That’s it. No crashing damage, no heavy physics, we’re here for the fun, and we don’t care about realism. You don’t start off with a big beast of a car, either. Need for Speed Underground 2 is the perfect example of a “started from the bottom, now we here” kind of game. You are given the option to grab an old Focus, a Peugeot 206, a 1980’s Corolla, and so on, as your first ride. Plus you need to figure out how to win races with that piece of junk in order to afford upgrades, and later down the line, new cars.

Starting off with a crappy Peugeot is cooler and more rewarding than being given a Mustang right from the get-go.

By the end of the game, you will have a garage full of Skylines, Hummers, Supras, and 350Zs, but you will still have your reliable Civic, completely pimped out, reminding you of your trials and tribulations. I think that the fact Need for Speed Underground 2 was full of simple cars we all had in our garages made it more realistic and relatable to the average gamer. Driving a Koenigsegg is cool and all, but there’s something about tuning a Peugeot 206, a car you could very well be an owner of back in 2004, that made the game connect with people to a more personal degree.

What also helped was the fact that Need for Speed Underground 2 was a banger in terms of its presentation. The visual effects whenever you pressed the nitrous button were amazing for the time. Granted, upon replaying it for the first time since the end of the Bush administration, I noticed that the framerate was a bit janky, running between 40 and 60fps, depending on the course, locale, and amount of neon signs plastering the screen. Still very good looking for the time, certainly more visually appealing than its successor, Most Wanted.

Welcome to Bayview. Not a single human being on the streets. Just lunatics with a death wish racing until the sun comes up.

Now we need to talk about the music. This is no hyperbole, Need for Speed Underground 2 was crucial in molding my musical tastes way back when I was just an eleven year old kid. This was the era when “EA Trax” was basically a free soundtrack to teach me about new, old, and unknown bands for me to download on Limewire. “In My Head” by Queens of the Stone Age, for instance. It was this game which presented me to QOTSA, and I have a tattoo of them on my back to this day. All thanks to Need for Speed Underground 2. “Give it All” by Rise Against. “No W” by Ministry. “Nobody” by Skindred. The outstanding “Celebration Song” by Unwritten Law.

But it wasn’t just rock music. Need for Speed Underground 2 also made me start liking hip hop, all thanks to tracks like “Lean Back” by Fat Joe and Terror Squad, or “I Need Speed” by Capone. Not to mention the most iconic song in the entire game, Snoop Dogg’s take on The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm“. In theory, it should have been a disaster. But it wasn’t. I’d dare to say that “Riders of the Storm” is better known as a Snoop song around people my age than an actual Doors classic.

A soundtrack which shaped a generation.

Need for Speed Underground 2 may have aged a bit in terms of its controls or the simplicity of its open world, but it’s still one hell of an entertaining racing game, even twenty years later. Its progression system, “2000s as hell” imagery (“yo dawg, let me send you an SMS via my Nokia”), amazing soundtrack… it’s all beautiful. It’s a really important staple for the racing game genre, being the game which popularized open world exploration and racing in the same package. Not a single Need for Speed game has managed to reach the same degree of importance and relevance to this day, and for a reason. This is just the pinnacle of the series, and a game worth revisiting if you have the means to do so.