Before Need for Speed was a household name, it traded on Road & Track‘s for some legitimacy. The first game in the series, launched on 3DO before coming to PC, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn between 1994 and 1996, is quite a different beast from the franchise that would follow. But in Japan, these games had an even more interesting start. Electronic Arts repackaged that first release no fewer than three times, and twice into Nissan tie-ins.
Most fans may know that NFS went by a different name in Japan through the PS1 era: Over Drivin’. The Japanese localization of the first installment was called Road & Track Presents: Over Drivin’ DX, and released about a month after it did on Sony’s console in North America. But it was preceded by a curious demo, Over Drivin’ DX Rally Edition. This promotional release had all of the standard game’s cars, but cut the tracks down to two and replaced their asphalt roads with dirt. The physics are a bit wilder to suit loose-surface driving, but overall Rally Edition is more a novelty than a secret masterpiece.
However, when Over Drivin’ made its way to Sega’s platform at the end of ’96, it swapped the game’s entire cast of sports cars and exotics, including the Ferrari 512 TR, Lamborghini Diablo, and Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, for Nissans. It also received a new name, titled Nissan Presents: Over Drivin’ GT-R.
Manufacturer-exclusive games were common in the ’80s and ’90s, as it was how many automakers first recognized the medium as legitimate for marketing. Lotus was among the first aboard, with games like Turbo Esprit on the ZX Spectrum and Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge on the Amiga. The practice continued well into the ensuing generations with Sony’s Porsche Challenge, EA’s Beetle Adventure Racing, and Sega’s Ferrari F355 Challenge.
Over Drivin’ GT-R is an interesting case, though, because it’s a Japan-customized version of a North American-developed game. Despite this, it’s still fully playable in English, though non-Japanese speakers will miss the voiceover presentations for all eight cars in the Showcase mode. The localization team really did a fantastic job of adding in that exclusive content—I smiled when I was able to make out “Group A” in a screed about the R32 GT-R.
The car roster, by the way, isn’t exclusively made up of GT-Rs. The 180SX, 240ZG, 300ZX, and Silvia S14 are here, too, each with their own B-roll films and in-race cockpit cameras, which are ultimately just textures with steering wheels that rotate. Still, that approach worked convincingly well back then, and it’s a technique I wish more racing games of the time attempted. Could you imagine the original Gran Turismo with interior views, even static ones?
Over Drivin’ GT-R has another big distinction: Whereas the normal game sends cops and traffic at the player in the head-to-head mode, the Nissan-flavored experience completely omits both. Not terribly surprising, considering that automakers tend to be very protective of the types of situations their products are observed in.
Nearly a year after Over Drivin’ GT-R graced the Saturn, developer Pioneer Productions gave it one more go with Nissan Presents: Over Drivin’ Skyline Memorial, exclusively for PlayStation. And despite that sounding like a depressing segment at the Oscars, it might be the better of the two, since the PS1 version of The Need for Speed ran smoother, with better lighting.
Once again, there are no cop chases to be had here, but all of the non-Skylines in the Saturn game have been swapped out. As a result, this title includes the top-performing version of almost every generation of Skyline up to the R33, going back to the Prince Skyline 2000GT. (Warning: It’s really slow!) And for a bonus car, rather than some generic spaceship on wheels, players were treated to the Nissan R390 GT1 in the black-and-red livery it wore during its first year of competition.
Truth be told, I’ve never been a massive fan of the first Need for Speed. The driving’s just too boring and the point-to-point tracks on wide public roads aren’t twisty enough to stay interesting. But it’s charming nevertheless because Pioneer and EA were clearly committed to representing that handful of cars as deeply as the technology allowed at the time. There were the specs, lifted from R&T; the richly shot videos, with footage filmed specifically for the game; and an overriding sense that these machines were technical achievements to be admired. The Nissan-centric versions of the game turn that lens on a different history, but they’re cut from the same cloth.
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