SHIFT was developed by the lads at UK-based independent Slightly Mad Studios, who have some serious racing sim credentials - under their former guise of Blimey! It has the same name, but this NFS bears only passing resemblance to its forebears.
With Need for Speed SHIFT, EA is putting that checkered past behind it and waving the chequered flag to signal a fresh start. Lately that success seems to have been lacking, with the last few games all receiving relatively poor reviews. Subsequent games in the Need for Speed series drifted significantly from this premise however, with the emphasis moving away from realism and more toward arcade action racing - to varying degrees of critical and popular success. It attempted to realistically simulate the look, feel, sound and handling of the nine vehicles on offer, right down to each car's dashboard and even the sound of its gear shifter. DSI was acquired by EA and became EA Canada in 1991.Ī few years later they released The Need For Speed, which was really an evolution of Test Drive, putting you behind the wheel of an expensive performance car and letting you loose on a scenic open road for a point-to-point race while avoiding being stopped by police.
The series has something of a checkered past, with successive releases erratically bouncing up to soaring highs (like the original The Need For Speed, Hot Pursuit and Porsche Unleashed) then swooping down to sputtering lows (like Need for Speed II, Hot Pursuit 2, Carbon, ProStreet and Undercover).īack in the late 1980's there was a very popular racing game by the name of Test Drive, developed by a Canadian studio called Distinctive Software Inc (DSI). Abrams did it with Star Trek - and now EA has done it with Need for Speed. "Rebooting" franchises seems to be all the rage right now.