EA's Need for Speed joins 100 Million Club

[korge]

VANCOUVER — Need for Speed, the 15-title Electronic Arts car-racing video game franchise that began in a tiny studio in Vancouver, will top the 100-million-units-sold mark this week.

The 100 Million Club is an elite group, occupied by only four other franchises: old-timer games Mario and Tetris, and the more modern Pokémon and The Sims. Not even Madden NFL, another EA sports franchise, has its foot in the 100 Million Club, sitting at about 75 million units sold.

About 80 million of Need for Speed's total were sold in the last six years, around the time EA released Need for Speed: Underground, which focused on street racing rather than race-course and cross-country racing, and targeted the young driving audience.

"A combination of the Black Box [a Vancouver division of EA Canada that, from 2002 to until recently, developed the Need for Speed products] game team's talent, the technology, the physics engines and the passion for auto racing really propelled the franchise over the last few years," said Keith Munro, EA vice-president of global marketing, So did moving away from racing cars to vehicles most video game players were familiar with: compacts and sub-compacts, or "grocery-getters" in Munro's words.

"Users could customize them, tweak them and express their own personal style with the cars," Munro said.

The genesis of Need for Speed can be traced to Don Mattrick and his Vancouver company Distinctive Software, which made a couple of car-racing games. Electronic Arts merged with Distinctive Software in 1991 to become EA Canada, and Mattrick became president of Electronic Arts Worldwide (he is now an executive at Microsoft).

EA published the first Need for Speed in 1994, with Mattrick as executive producer, following it with games in 1997 and '98.

Those early games were modest ventures, usually developed by a team of 15 or fewer. The original game could fit into one megabyte of RAM, and its highest-resolution cars had 70 polygons (shapes used to produce 3-D characters). By contrast, today's games have 100 people working on them and the highest-resolution vehicles are 30,000 polygons.

From its origins of race-car driving, the franchise has branched out. The Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted titles involve police car chases, Underground brought in urban street racing, and last month's Need for Speed: Shift, co-developed by Black Box and Slightly Mad Studios in London, simulates the driving experience, giving the player the point of view of "what it feels like to be in a cockpit going 180 miles an hour in some amazing race cars."

Game team members know exactly what it's like; many of them have ridden in race cars at that speed to get a feel for it. The head of development for Need for Speed: Shift, Patrick Soderland, is a professional race driver who has participated in the Dubai 24 Hours.

On Nov. 3, EA will release Need for Speed: Nitro, an arcade game built in EA's Montreal studio exclusively for Nintendo platforms.

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Ne ... story.html