I played this when it was new, taking turns at the keyboard of my friend’s gaming PC. Kind of wild to revisit on my phone today and have it work perfectly.
I wish the circumstances around abandonware games weren’t so tenuous, there’s so much great stuff out there and reverse engineering with AI unlocks all sorts of cool possibilities. The multiplayer features here have me thinking about other old games that could be brought online and how fun it could be. SimCity 2000 where all the neighboring cities are real and operated by other players…
I recall playing the demo level on an Elonex laptop that my brother had for work and we played it repeatedly. When SE came out with the 3DFX support, we were absolutely amazed at the fog and water effects in game.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.
Been playing it the last few days along with a few races with friends, it's pretty wild that this is even possible. The only downside is that this website isn't legal and now that it's popular it's probably getting a takedown soon.
But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work. I use this command to make it work on Chromium:
>But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
Need for Speed is trademarked, and they do actively continue to publish and sell games under that trademark. They don't sell some particular older games, but they definitely do make and distribute videogames games bearing the trademark "Need for Speed".
Massive issue with a game like NFSU2 is all the licensed music. I just watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdLZTgMDd4&t=735s) of an EA producer working on bringing back old games, and he said it took them over a year just to get the music licenses for a 30 year old game. And that's if they can get the licenses. Famously, no one really knows who owns the game No One Lives Forever, and the supposed rights holders aren't particularly interested in digging through their pre-digital legal archives to try to find the required documents that assert those rights.
Games are bundles of licenses themselves. That music costs money, as do other assets and sometimes engines. And over time some of those licenses can expire or require renegotiation. Sometimes it's easier to just stop selling something than figure all that out.
Because this is a billion dollar corporation and those typically hire cutthroat teams that negotiate with other cutthroat companies. I recently tried licensing a 50-year-old unaired raw video from a news corporation. It's in the range of $5-10k. We're talking b-roll with dead air and such.. big companies aren't interested in this stuff
When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following:
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Linux support for WebGPU is incomplete. Other platforms have received more priority and have it enabled by default. Even on platforms where Chrome does support it, the tech isn't available on other browsers necessarily.
I was gonna respond with the generic large swath of unverified code running on your machine, but I realized your question is more specific and more interesting. If anyone knows, I would love to hear an answer on this as well.
Being new, largely untested code paths in the browser, it's very possible for it to have buffer overflow defects that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on your system. So, basically, literally anything could happen.
> Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
I think they should be far more worried about the music rights holders than EA. When I fired it up I was greeted to a menu playing The Doors & Snoop Dogg lol
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
Also not sure if you’ve ever been part of a private tracker but there a much higher percentage of users have additional motivation to contribute. Some of that is because contributing provides additional benefits to consumption. But also it’s for the love of the game. The losses of oink and what.cd were a bit like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Those libraries were the cumulative effort of tens of thousands of people sharing and meticulously cataloging. Much closer to maintaining a library or an archive than something like TPB. There is no doubt there is music that is now lost to time which was once dutifully uploaded and then preserved by a seeder on those sites. I personally have uploaded content that is not available to purchase anywhere to their successor.
A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.
we should write to EA legal team asap.
/s
"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"
Yeah but that will not lead to spontanious $5 donation. And i bet, based on the project itself, that the person did not think it through at all. So he would need to buy the server anonomous and the domain too.
Something about the like soft almost dream like lighting of this era of games just feels so much more comforting and inviting than todays hyper realistic graphics.
I've often felt this most with the Grand Theft Auto games, there was a level of visual abstraction in the III series that IV and V lost and trying to take in the world moving around you is too much.
Art is born out of limitations, if you only have a PS2 to work with you have to get creative to make it look good. Now you can just dump whatever you want into the game.
This is great, I have been thinking about revisiting this old game. Unfortunately, it is not available for sale anywhere (probably for music licensing issues, see other games such as Alan Wake), and older versions don't run as well as they could.
I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
Free roam with online players is such a great concept! However, playing in the browser is not ideal. Are the extra features (name claims, multiplayer free roam, etc) available in a native version? It is unclear to me whether https://github.com/TalhaMudo/NFSU2Recomp includes these extra goodies.
A relatively good resource to discover game recompilations is https://recomp.gg/, but there is no obvious way to contribute, and no search functionalityy.
I was pleasantly surprised recently with the lutris install scripts on Linux for NFSU2. I remember a few years ago struggling with it, it ran but often crashed in the middle of the game.
The absolute nostaliga wave that just hit me playing this. I was visiting family friends over Christmas and this was the game that year. Played it for about 6 hours straight with my brother and our parents friends kids.
Introduced me to so much music that shapped my musical tastes for years afterwards.
I miss this era of games when it felt like there was genuine inovation and competition in games and consoles. THPS2, THUG, Need for Speed. WWE all of them had unbelivable soundtracks and felt like they were trying to push the envelope with new features.
Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
> Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
It was the age of games being so difficult to make that you could only find things that survive the enduring process. There was still shovelware, but it was rare compared to what you find on Steam in 2026.
I think it's really cool bringing old games back to life with all the conveniences of the web platform. I did a HoMM3 typescript rewrite with Claude Code recently exactly for this reason: ability to run in the browser, incl mobile devices with cloud saves. But I'm not hosting anything publicly for that
There was always loyal community around “old” games, this has nothing to do with AI. It’s the modern, shallow, money-first game development approach that pushes people. AI is a godsend that allows to cheaply modify the games.
No, my brother, this was simply incredible. The interface for using it on a cell phone blew me away, and the fluidity is amazing, but seeing that multiplayer mode, that truly blew me away.
This stuff is fun lately, I've been working on an engine for a while and ported a little game over to the browser here. It's a voxel kart racer as a browser project. Think classic kart racing, but with a voxel aesthetic. It's a fun little experiment, so I figured I'd share it here!
Thanks! Still needs a bit of work and polish, of course, but glad you enjoyed it! It includes multiplayer as well, which I've done a bit of testing on. If you notice anything or have any suggestions, feel free to let me know. I enjoy tinkering with these kinds of projects!
This is such a fun blast from the past! I remember playing the entire NFS Underground on both the PC and the XBox - it had the most fun gameplay even compared to all the newer, shinier stuff that came later. LLAP.
I guess this was made with automatic shift in mind? There are no controls for manual shifting on-screen. Did not find an easy way to enable this. Stutters often due to asset loading. Not a very pleasant experience... and likely very illegal to distribute/host (though I 'own' this game).
The best part for me was Riders on the Storm by The Doors. Without NFS I probably would never have come across the song. I still listen to it now and then and it brings back that same feeling every time.
I remember trying to play Need For Speed 1 and that was incredibly sensitive to damage and I found it very difficult compared to 2. Need For Speed 3 changed the default camera angle to make the car take up a lot of the screen. But I remember having a lot of fun with the game. It came with a PC my dad bought but there was zero chance it'd run on that DirectX HAL3D "GPU" and the Cyrix processor in it. Ah, the memories.
They also remember Screamer and Screamer 2 being great around the same time.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
I loved the original NFS games where you could drive exotic cars in open roads, and didn’t love when they started being about modded regular cars… still had a lot of fun with this Underground 2.
I played a lot of this with a friend a few days ago, it's awesome. I hope more old games get revived this way, specially the unique ones where we don't have a modern equivalents that are better.
Playing in freeplay, I feel like I am Jason Dessen from Dark Matter. So many green Nissan 350Zs. It is impossible to drive a 100ft without hitting someone like me.
It's cool, I saw a lot of people posting videos and screenshots of thousands of players online. I briefly remember playing NFSUG2 but it was never my cup of tea. Somehow the open world felt a bit empty, hopefully this makes it feel more alive.
On the website they seem to be doing NFSUG1 as well and it's my favorite version of NFS and I hope I can check it out when it's ready.
Screamer 2, I had a copy of that, wow that brings back partial fragments of memories. That's going back a ways. I think I spent a fair bit of time in that one.
A young person asked me this same question about the demo the private jet company put out a few months ago showing the satellite view from the “seat” of any flight path in the world…
It honestly made me really sad.
I’m especially confused in the context of technology (are you familiar with the historical context of the term “hacker”? serious question!).
Yes: people do things all day every day not explicitly allowed or protected by law.
What a bleak future. People can’t have any protection for things they pour thousands of hours of work into because the needs of Anthropic have to take precedence.
In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.
I think it's already very disappointing how badly the systems held against web-wide theft, and how they continue to fail as the tools get better. We built license laundering machines, and the internet is becoming a digital looting playground, where theft is being normalized.
Then why should I trust that systems will be built that will protect my future needs?
It's not but who cares at this point when regular people see that the big tech companies commiting the biggest robbery of the century and nothing happens.
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
I still am not sure whether wasm/webgl is suitable for 3d games with some complexity. You'll eventually have some GC pauses during game play. This one included, despite the rest of the game being smooth.
I found the Corsica training map to be incredibly difficult when they were trying to train you how to do S-curves and I kept trying to drove around the bends instead of doing a straight line. Ever since then, I've taken roundabouts in the UK like S-curves.
i really worry about what the big game developers are going to do to fight against these types of projects. wondering if we are fucking up the future of game preservation because people want to generate web versions of games they like
Same as always. Get services (google, github, chatgpt, reddit, etc.) to not help you find it. There is really no difference between distributing a decomp with assets and the real game with assets.
Use yandex for this sort of thing.
If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later.
I imagine they will just switch to offering cloud gaming exclusively. It allows them to sell to anyone with a screen, regardless of specs. It also aligns perfectly with the ongoing death of local gaming hardware.
People have been claiming this in response to piracy for decades, yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Perhaps game developers already have the tools they need: try distributing your browser version of a game anybody cares about instead of a 20 year old game. This game isn't even available on Steam/GOG.
> why would anyone pay for a game running in a browser?
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser? Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games. The top games on Twitch are World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft -- all trivial to build in the browser.
But browser gaming isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play this pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download this pirated game".
Piracy didn't kill the gaming industry. I think the bigger threat is indie games that are trivial to clone with AI.
> the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers
Some lawyers are extremely litigious.
This might be daydreaming and wholly unreasonable, but I think that it should go like this: “As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.”
Can’t afford to patch the game for vulnerabilities in the code or host servers? That’s okay, the community will do that for you after they reverse engineer it.
But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.
> As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.
i worked at a place where to get anything done, you had to demonstrate "Business Impact": is what you're about to do going to actually help revenue? if not, move on to something that does
i agree, a suit should only be taken seriously if the company can demonstrate that they are actively losing revenue because of the game preservation effort, otherwise toss it in the bin
why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were wasting time chasing frivolous suits and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...
> why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were wasting time chasing frivolous suits and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...
Because the lawyers can for example, argue that their current games can be future targets of unauthorized recomp'd redistributions that will impact the sales of the business.
Nintendo also sells and offers old games digitally and they have the correct rights in redistributing them which this still counts as a "actively commercial game" even if it is old.
These companies don't care about ripped and recompiled games if it is done for private use. They only care if the game and its assets are redistributed in an unauthorized manner.
I worry more about how this affects smaller and indie developers. As soon as you put out a trailer or any footage a hundred clones of your game will appear on Steam. Development blogs and community building are just attack surfaces for the slop machine now.
I played this when it was new, taking turns at the keyboard of my friend’s gaming PC. Kind of wild to revisit on my phone today and have it work perfectly.
I wish the circumstances around abandonware games weren’t so tenuous, there’s so much great stuff out there and reverse engineering with AI unlocks all sorts of cool possibilities. The multiplayer features here have me thinking about other old games that could be brought online and how fun it could be. SimCity 2000 where all the neighboring cities are real and operated by other players…
Sim City (2013) with large maps.
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
Please keep us updated!
I recall playing the demo level on an Elonex laptop that my brother had for work and we played it repeatedly. When SE came out with the 3DFX support, we were absolutely amazed at the fog and water effects in game.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
I just saw a game on itch with psx LDS 'reimagining'. Gonna be fun times.
On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.
To me, NFS Underground 2 is one of those games I can revisit time and time again. It's one of the most fun arcade racing games ever made.
But when you have a kid, you might want to share the experience with them. They'll see the magic.
My brother has our Xbox from when we were kids and his kids love all those games we grew up with.
Been playing it the last few days along with a few races with friends, it's pretty wild that this is even possible. The only downside is that this website isn't legal and now that it's popular it's probably getting a takedown soon.
But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work. I use this command to make it work on Chromium:
chromium --enable-unsafe-webgpu --ozone-platform=x11 --use-angle=vulkan --enable-features=Vulkan,VulkanFromANGLE
Was able to get webGPU working without losing the sandbox (Sandboxed=true on chrome://gpu) by doing (agent output below):
1. Copy NVIDIA’s Vulkan manifest to a filename Chrome’s sandbox permits:
2. Launch Chrome with NVIDIA-only Vulkan enumeration and forced WebGPU interop: And then now I just have my chrome launcher store that environment variable with the feature set via chrome://flags/#force-enable-webgpu-interop(Note: running proprietary RPMFusion Nvidia drivers on Fedora KDE Wayland)
>But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
Need for Speed is trademarked, and they do actively continue to publish and sell games under that trademark. They don't sell some particular older games, but they definitely do make and distribute videogames games bearing the trademark "Need for Speed".
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed/need-for-speed-unbou...
This same failure to defend concept doesn't apply to copyright, at all.
Every time this is brought up I always think why can't the company setup a simple website where you pay 1 dollar and get a license?
Massive issue with a game like NFSU2 is all the licensed music. I just watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdLZTgMDd4&t=735s) of an EA producer working on bringing back old games, and he said it took them over a year just to get the music licenses for a 30 year old game. And that's if they can get the licenses. Famously, no one really knows who owns the game No One Lives Forever, and the supposed rights holders aren't particularly interested in digging through their pre-digital legal archives to try to find the required documents that assert those rights.
Games are bundles of licenses themselves. That music costs money, as do other assets and sometimes engines. And over time some of those licenses can expire or require renegotiation. Sometimes it's easier to just stop selling something than figure all that out.
Because this is a billion dollar corporation and those typically hire cutthroat teams that negotiate with other cutthroat companies. I recently tried licensing a 50-year-old unaired raw video from a news corporation. It's in the range of $5-10k. We're talking b-roll with dead air and such.. big companies aren't interested in this stuff
When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following:
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Thanks.
> Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work.
Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!
Linux support for WebGPU is incomplete. Other platforms have received more priority and have it enabled by default. Even on platforms where Chrome does support it, the tech isn't available on other browsers necessarily.
I think the most nefarious thing they can do with this is use it to further fingerprint your browser.
Oops, meant to reply to the GP.
I was gonna respond with the generic large swath of unverified code running on your machine, but I realized your question is more specific and more interesting. If anyone knows, I would love to hear an answer on this as well.
Being new, largely untested code paths in the browser, it's very possible for it to have buffer overflow defects that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on your system. So, basically, literally anything could happen.
This is the best Need for Speed game. I don't understand why no other racing game tries to emulate it in the modern era.
Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
Yeah I believe taking donations was the legal downfall of some otherwise legal emulators on the market.
> Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
I think they should be far more worried about the music rights holders than EA. When I fired it up I was greeted to a menu playing The Doors & Snoop Dogg lol
Interestingly they kinda already expect that due to their contact details
> Help, bugs and questions: our Discord. > Rights holders: legal (at) nfsu2.xyz.
I wonder if the email just goes to /dev/null
Multiplayer works, great job!
how to spot fun police at parties
>But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
It's rightfully romanticized when companies fail to make their products easily available for purchase and usable far into the future.
Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
> For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price
So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
it's still love of the game tho?
donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary
When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
you're confusing pirate consumers and pirate providers
You’re absolutely right. I was way too eager to jump on that
Also not sure if you’ve ever been part of a private tracker but there a much higher percentage of users have additional motivation to contribute. Some of that is because contributing provides additional benefits to consumption. But also it’s for the love of the game. The losses of oink and what.cd were a bit like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Those libraries were the cumulative effort of tens of thousands of people sharing and meticulously cataloging. Much closer to maintaining a library or an archive than something like TPB. There is no doubt there is music that is now lost to time which was once dutifully uploaded and then preserved by a seeder on those sites. I personally have uploaded content that is not available to purchase anywhere to their successor.
EA: “You software pirates lack honor, you do it just to make a quick buck, just for money! We do it, for glory, for integrity, for respect!”
Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”
As a capitalist, I agree.
A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.
we should write to EA legal team asap.
/s
"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"
you can always use monero or (btc and then mixer) or (eth and then tornado cash)
Yeah but that will not lead to spontanious $5 donation. And i bet, based on the project itself, that the person did not think it through at all. So he would need to buy the server anonomous and the domain too.
yeah you're right, the financial system as a surveillance tool at its finest.
Something about the like soft almost dream like lighting of this era of games just feels so much more comforting and inviting than todays hyper realistic graphics.
I've often felt this most with the Grand Theft Auto games, there was a level of visual abstraction in the III series that IV and V lost and trying to take in the world moving around you is too much.
Art is born out of limitations, if you only have a PS2 to work with you have to get creative to make it look good. Now you can just dump whatever you want into the game.
Having game designers rather than film school hacks might have something to do with it.
This is great, I have been thinking about revisiting this old game. Unfortunately, it is not available for sale anywhere (probably for music licensing issues, see other games such as Alan Wake), and older versions don't run as well as they could.
I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
Free roam with online players is such a great concept! However, playing in the browser is not ideal. Are the extra features (name claims, multiplayer free roam, etc) available in a native version? It is unclear to me whether https://github.com/TalhaMudo/NFSU2Recomp includes these extra goodies.
A relatively good resource to discover game recompilations is https://recomp.gg/, but there is no obvious way to contribute, and no search functionalityy.
What do you mean about Alan Wake? It's available in online stores
I used it as a notorious example (among others) of a game that was removed from storefronts because of music licensing deals expiring: https://www.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/6asmg9/alan_wake_will_...
Looking a bit more into it, they are now selling the game again, with some track removed (notably "space oddity").
NFSU2 is known for its iconic music, so I am not sure they could sell copies without at least some of the more iconic original music.
It was temporarily removed some years back
A better example is Spec Ops: The Line, which was removed from online stores in 2024 and remains unavailable to this day.
> I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
A firm has generational culture locked up, and won’t take money for even a low-effort re-release?
Nobody’s being harmed, here.
I was pleasantly surprised recently with the lutris install scripts on Linux for NFSU2. I remember a few years ago struggling with it, it ran but often crashed in the middle of the game.
It detects Safari as not having webGPU support but that isn't true any more.
The absolute nostaliga wave that just hit me playing this. I was visiting family friends over Christmas and this was the game that year. Played it for about 6 hours straight with my brother and our parents friends kids.
Introduced me to so much music that shapped my musical tastes for years afterwards.
I miss this era of games when it felt like there was genuine inovation and competition in games and consoles. THPS2, THUG, Need for Speed. WWE all of them had unbelivable soundtracks and felt like they were trying to push the envelope with new features.
Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
I'm not a big fan of 3+4 and never played THPS1, but the official THPS1+2 remaster has amazing.
> Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
It was the age of games being so difficult to make that you could only find things that survive the enduring process. There was still shovelware, but it was rare compared to what you find on Steam in 2026.
I think it's really cool bringing old games back to life with all the conveniences of the web platform. I did a HoMM3 typescript rewrite with Claude Code recently exactly for this reason: ability to run in the browser, incl mobile devices with cloud saves. But I'm not hosting anything publicly for that
This is one of my favorite games of all time. What a time to be alive.
Funny how AI has enabled us to long for the days without AI. We didn't know what we had in the 90s/2000s, it was the golden age in PC gaming.
There was always loyal community around “old” games, this has nothing to do with AI. It’s the modern, shallow, money-first game development approach that pushes people. AI is a godsend that allows to cheaply modify the games.
Until now was impossible to bring a win xp game to browser in a week by an average dev. Show me otherwise.
That brought me back, what a classic game. Thanks for this.
Second, accepting donations for an EA game might be a bad idea; the recompile itself freely accessible without donations might stay around.
Riders on the storm ...
Opened the link just to see if the song was included
into this house we're born …
No, my brother, this was simply incredible. The interface for using it on a cell phone blew me away, and the fluidity is amazing, but seeing that multiplayer mode, that truly blew me away.
This just shows what's possible. Copyright should be 10 years
https://voxelblox-notes.pages.dev/play/
This stuff is fun lately, I've been working on an engine for a while and ported a little game over to the browser here. It's a voxel kart racer as a browser project. Think classic kart racing, but with a voxel aesthetic. It's a fun little experiment, so I figured I'd share it here!
This is fun. It reminds me a bit of Lego Racers from 1999.
Thanks! Still needs a bit of work and polish, of course, but glad you enjoyed it! It includes multiplayer as well, which I've done a bit of testing on. If you notice anything or have any suggestions, feel free to let me know. I enjoy tinkering with these kinds of projects!
I remember playing this on a PC when it came out. Graphics still looks good today and is surprisingly playable on a 8 inch tablet.
It played perfectly for me, very nostalgic. Amazed how it just worked.
This is such a fun blast from the past! I remember playing the entire NFS Underground on both the PC and the XBox - it had the most fun gameplay even compared to all the newer, shinier stuff that came later. LLAP.
It is surprising that it works decently on an old Android phone (A525G)
This game ran smoothly on a PlayStation 2, which is massively less performant than even the cheapest phones these days.
I guess this was made with automatic shift in mind? There are no controls for manual shifting on-screen. Did not find an easy way to enable this. Stutters often due to asset loading. Not a very pleasant experience... and likely very illegal to distribute/host (though I 'own' this game).
The best part for me was Riders on the Storm by The Doors. Without NFS I probably would never have come across the song. I still listen to it now and then and it brings back that same feeling every time.
I got this for my 9th birthday when it was just out, but wasn't able to install it on my dad's PC so the only way to play it was at friends' houses.
So nice to see this work in a browser on my ancient smart phone without any issue.
I remember trying to play Need For Speed 1 and that was incredibly sensitive to damage and I found it very difficult compared to 2. Need For Speed 3 changed the default camera angle to make the car take up a lot of the screen. But I remember having a lot of fun with the game. It came with a PC my dad bought but there was zero chance it'd run on that DirectX HAL3D "GPU" and the Cyrix processor in it. Ah, the memories.
They also remember Screamer and Screamer 2 being great around the same time.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
I loved the original NFS games where you could drive exotic cars in open roads, and didn’t love when they started being about modded regular cars… still had a lot of fun with this Underground 2.
I am a huge fan of Need For Speed. This game gave me nostalgia. The best 60 minutes I have spent!
I played a lot of this with a friend a few days ago, it's awesome. I hope more old games get revived this way, specially the unique ones where we don't have a modern equivalents that are better.
The chaos of all of the other players joining in career mode is really funny.
Very nice loading times. Almost instant from cold start. Some clever tech used.
For me performance is poor, it's unplayable. To run the game, I had to turn on Chrome's enable-unsafe-webgpu setting.
For me it worked fine - even on an iPhone running Safari
It's odd, it worked flawlessly on a M2 Macbook air running Firefox. I usually have to switch to Chrome for anything fancier than just browsing.
On Ubuntu WebGPU and Vulkan was disabled, after enabling, it ran well.
For comparison, I get a perfect frame rate on an iPhone 14.
Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.
Just enabled a couple of flags (#enable-vulkan, #default-angle-vulkan), now it's good.
Playing in freeplay, I feel like I am Jason Dessen from Dark Matter. So many green Nissan 350Zs. It is impossible to drive a 100ft without hitting someone like me.
This is just piracy compiled to wasm.
Which I guess is cool that LLMs can compile stuff to wasm, but there is absolutely nothing new, interesting or good about this.
We had piracy before. The only thing that changed is that it is packaged into an html wrapper now
It's cool, I saw a lot of people posting videos and screenshots of thousands of players online. I briefly remember playing NFSUG2 but it was never my cup of tea. Somehow the open world felt a bit empty, hopefully this makes it feel more alive.
On the website they seem to be doing NFSUG1 as well and it's my favorite version of NFS and I hope I can check it out when it's ready.
That was rather fun in online mode!
Can I selfhost this game locally? I have the suspicion it won't stay online for long.
https://github.com/th0mk/nfsu2-web
Note that you need a specific copy of the game (.exe file)
Oh, I really didn't expected it to play smoothly on my six years old phone (Samsung S20+),Kudos!
I didn't play much NFS back then, the two racing games that I played mostly in the past were Screamer 2 & Test Drive 6.
Screamer 2, I had a copy of that, wow that brings back partial fragments of memories. That's going back a ways. I think I spent a fair bit of time in that one.
serious question: how is this legal?
I think we've abandoned rule-based world order.
What, on the Internet?
Bits have been “fair game” for decades.
A young person asked me this same question about the demo the private jet company put out a few months ago showing the satellite view from the “seat” of any flight path in the world…
It honestly made me really sad.
I’m especially confused in the context of technology (are you familiar with the historical context of the term “hacker”? serious question!).
Yes: people do things all day every day not explicitly allowed or protected by law.
It's not
It could become legal in the future. I don't see how we can have machine god and copyright, and it's clearly copyright that has to budge.
>It could become legal in the future. I don't see how we can have machine god and copyright, and it's clearly copyright that has to budge.
one could say it seems to already have budged.
As long as lawyers love money, that will not change.
What a bleak future. People can’t have any protection for things they pour thousands of hours of work into because the needs of Anthropic have to take precedence.
In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.
I think it's already very disappointing how badly the systems held against web-wide theft, and how they continue to fail as the tools get better. We built license laundering machines, and the internet is becoming a digital looting playground, where theft is being normalized.
Then why should I trust that systems will be built that will protect my future needs?
It's not but who cares at this point when regular people see that the big tech companies commiting the biggest robbery of the century and nothing happens.
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
I still am not sure whether wasm/webgl is suitable for 3d games with some complexity. You'll eventually have some GC pauses during game play. This one included, despite the rest of the game being smooth.
Give us Porsche Unleashed ... that was proper great NFS.
+1, except some levels were hard ones
I found the Corsica training map to be incredibly difficult when they were trying to train you how to do S-curves and I kept trying to drove around the bends instead of doing a straight line. Ever since then, I've taken roundabouts in the UK like S-curves.
Thank you, EA.
How does it work technically speaking? WASM decomplication?
https://github.com/th0mk/nfsu2-web/blob/main/README.md
chitown26.com - turned my portfolio into a full arcade with custom games
Wow, that brough back some memories, thank you for sharing this :) are there more available?
What a throwback, thanks for making it!
That was fun!
One of my all time favorites! God bless.
I played the absolute shit out of this on my GameCube. Even had a racing wheel for it. And the soundtrack was the bomb!
Do CS1.6 and CS Source next
https://play-cs.com/
Physics hold great!
https://imgur.com/a/WSRTF7h
How the heck
How does one achieves this?
Seems like it's been recompiled for wasm, but how was the server built and free roam multiplayer implemented?
Vibecoding.
Lots and lots of vibecoding.
Ask the LLM that did it.
Wow this plays great even in browser on my phone
Still have this on two CD. Lol.
Online needs reimplementation, with matchmaking instead of lobby list, and matching cars, otherwise it is not fun.
i really worry about what the big game developers are going to do to fight against these types of projects. wondering if we are fucking up the future of game preservation because people want to generate web versions of games they like
Same as always. Get services (google, github, chatgpt, reddit, etc.) to not help you find it. There is really no difference between distributing a decomp with assets and the real game with assets.
Use yandex for this sort of thing.
If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later.
> If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later.
Second that, and we'd get higher quality assets. Game engines could be rewritten/rewired to support ray-tracing and what not. Exciting.
I imagine they will just switch to offering cloud gaming exclusively. It allows them to sell to anyone with a screen, regardless of specs. It also aligns perfectly with the ongoing death of local gaming hardware.
People have been claiming this in response to piracy for decades, yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Perhaps game developers already have the tools they need: try distributing your browser version of a game anybody cares about instead of a 20 year old game. This game isn't even available on Steam/GOG.
Only 20 year old games have any hope running in the browser. And why would anyone pay for a game running in a browser? It doesn't make any sense.
> yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Not all people, especially not if piracy is easy.
> why would anyone pay for a game running in a browser?
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser? Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games. The top games on Twitch are World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft -- all trivial to build in the browser.
But browser gaming isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play this pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download this pirated game".
Piracy didn't kill the gaming industry. I think the bigger threat is indie games that are trivial to clone with AI.
its not a definite, but it seems that the projects that get taken down the quickest are the ones that try to run ads / monetize the work
the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers
> the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers
Some lawyers are extremely litigious.
This might be daydreaming and wholly unreasonable, but I think that it should go like this: “As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.”
Can’t afford to patch the game for vulnerabilities in the code or host servers? That’s okay, the community will do that for you after they reverse engineer it.
But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.
> As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.
i worked at a place where to get anything done, you had to demonstrate "Business Impact": is what you're about to do going to actually help revenue? if not, move on to something that does
i agree, a suit should only be taken seriously if the company can demonstrate that they are actively losing revenue because of the game preservation effort, otherwise toss it in the bin
why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were wasting time chasing frivolous suits and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...
> why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were wasting time chasing frivolous suits and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...
Because the lawyers can for example, argue that their current games can be future targets of unauthorized recomp'd redistributions that will impact the sales of the business.
Nintendo also sells and offers old games digitally and they have the correct rights in redistributing them which this still counts as a "actively commercial game" even if it is old.
These companies don't care about ripped and recompiled games if it is done for private use. They only care if the game and its assets are redistributed in an unauthorized manner.
> But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.
It costs EA nothing and their owners have funds from sources that make the cat-and-mouse game expensive for the reuploaders.
It's time companies start actually releasing the source to games, rather than hiding behind a billion layers of DRM.
I worry more about how this affects smaller and indie developers. As soon as you put out a trailer or any footage a hundred clones of your game will appear on Steam. Development blogs and community building are just attack surfaces for the slop machine now.
Umm imagine if we did this with SSX 3 and had thousands of players riding the full mountain run at the same time o.O
...if your browser is Chromium, don't bother trying with Firefox.
Graphics (WebGPU)
Firefox for Android has no WebGPU yet. Play in Chrome.GPU-OFF-FIREFOX-ANDROID
It's 2026, and we still haven't solved the aliasing problems.
bro does anyone have all cars unlocked saved data that can share!? :D
You don't need anything but the Corolla. I am not kidding.
thats so cool bro and how is the performance like? Also can you use a controller?