While the earlier games for the most part stuck to their lanes, Most Wanted and Carbon were fairly convincing amalgamations of the Gumball 3000 and Halfords car park rev-off polar opposite car cultures. Whatever your dream car, be it on the cover of Max Power or Evo Magazine, you could enjoy it in the environment it best suited on a Need for Speed game. Their reach spans everything from speeding across blazing hot deserts in a Porsche Carrera GT Concept in the supercar extravaganza Hot Pursuit series, to bolting neons onto a 1.1-litre Peugeot 106 in time for a top shelf rag photoshoot – thank you dearly for nurturing the inner chav of a generation, Underground and Underground 2.

To pick one of these games would be to do the others a disservice, so 2002’s Hot Pursuit 2, 2003’s Underground, 2004’s Underground 2, 2005’s Most Wanted and 2006’s Carbon all get their fair mention. There are few car games however, that affected youth car culture, for better or worse, quite as profoundly as the Need for Speed franchise. Ask us to name a better driving simulator and I’ll name you ten.

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