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…
mvcosta91 44 minutes ago [-]
Sim City (2013) with large maps.
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
x______________ 37 minutes ago [-]
Please keep us updated!
rustyhancock 2 hours ago [-]
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.
m00dy 2 hours ago [-]
Multiplayer works, great job!
honkostani 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
PorciiVorbesc 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
hobofan 1 hours ago [-]
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.
sigmoid10 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Grombobulous 22 minutes ago [-]
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:
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.
brink 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Forgeties79 1 minutes ago [-]
When did that exist? The abstract error? People just got free music and accidentally put viruses on their computer. The 18th century? There was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worded.
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff. There are people across the spectrum with other motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and I drove them to Paris. But at the end of the day, the bastard majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
mag7269 36 minutes ago [-]
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.”
origini 2 hours ago [-]
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"
m00dy 2 hours ago [-]
you can always use monero or (btc and then mixer) or (eth and then tornado cash)
origini 2 hours ago [-]
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.
m00dy 2 hours ago [-]
yeah you're right, the financial system as a surveillance tool at its finest.
popcar2 51 minutes ago [-]
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:
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.
Jtarii 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
threetonesun 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
cite_please 44 minutes ago [-]
Having game designers rather than film school hacks might have something to do with it.
harrisoned 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
MayeulC 4 hours ago [-]
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.
leni536 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
gonzalohm 3 hours ago [-]
What do you mean about Alan Wake? It's available in online stores
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.
sufficientsoup 3 hours ago [-]
It was temporarily removed some years back
jasomill 5 minutes ago [-]
A better example is Spec Ops: The Line, which was removed from online stores in 2024 and remains unavailable to this day.
DANmode 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
havaloc 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
wiseowise 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
geekgod382 24 minutes ago [-]
I am a huge fan of Need For Speed. This game gave me nostalgia. The best 60 minutes I have spent!
Allwynd 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
diimdeep 4 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
zacian 2 hours ago [-]
Riders on the storm ...
tap-snap-or-nap 2 hours ago [-]
It played perfectly for me, very nostalgic. Amazed how it just worked.
graso 1 hours ago [-]
It is surprising that it works decently on an old Android phone (A525G)
jon-wood 49 minutes ago [-]
This game ran smoothly on a PlayStation 2, which is massively less performant than even the cheapest phones these days.
gbraad 4 hours ago [-]
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).
2 hours ago [-]
wg0 34 minutes ago [-]
How does it work technically speaking? WASM decomplication?
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!
hexad74 3 hours ago [-]
This is fun. It reminds me a bit of Lego Racers from 1999.
theropost 2 hours ago [-]
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!
redbell 2 hours ago [-]
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.
BLKNSLVR 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
Dries007 3 hours ago [-]
The chaos of all of the other players joining in career mode is really funny.
andix 2 hours ago [-]
Can I selfhost this game locally? I have the suspicion it won't stay online for long.
Note that you need a specific copy of the game (.exe file)
senfiaj 3 hours ago [-]
For me performance is poor, it's unplayable. To run the game, I had to turn on Chrome's enable-unsafe-webgpu setting.
lbreakjai 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
senfiaj 48 minutes ago [-]
On Ubuntu WebGPU and Vulkan was disabled, after enabling, it ran well.
catoc 32 minutes ago [-]
For me it worked fine - even on an iPhone running Safari
KMnO4 2 hours ago [-]
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.
senfiaj 2 hours ago [-]
Just enabled a couple of flags (#enable-vulkan, #default-angle-vulkan), now it's good.
tevlon 3 hours ago [-]
serious question: how is this legal?
m00dy 2 hours ago [-]
I think we've abandoned rule-based world order.
DANmode 1 hours ago [-]
What, on the Internet?
Bits have been “fair game” for decades.
DANmode 1 hours ago [-]
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.
hobofan 3 hours ago [-]
It's not
Ampersander 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jon-wood 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
xpct 15 minutes ago [-]
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?
serf 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
rvz 56 minutes ago [-]
As long as lawyers love money, that will not change.
thrownawaysz 2 hours ago [-]
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]
bix6 52 minutes ago [-]
One of my all time favorites! God bless.
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
Give us Porsche Unleashed ... that was proper great NFS.
dainiusse 53 minutes ago [-]
+1, except some levels were hard ones
assadkhan84 2 hours ago [-]
Wow, that brough back some memories, thank you for sharing this :) are there more available?
sgt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
polytely 2 hours ago [-]
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
nonethewiser 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
breisa 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
hombre_fatal 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
jareklupinski 2 hours ago [-]
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
KronisLV 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jareklupinski 30 minutes ago [-]
> 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...
rvz 38 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
rfgplk 48 minutes ago [-]
It's time companies start actually releasing the source to games, rather than hiding behind a billion layers of DRM.
krapp 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
bajard 3 hours ago [-]
It's 2026, and we still haven't solved the aliasing problems.
7Chinguun7 4 hours ago [-]
thats so cool bro and how is the performance like? Also can you use a controller?
Rendered at 14:46:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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…
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff. There are people across the spectrum with other motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and I drove them to Paris. But at the end of the day, the bastard majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”
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"
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
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.
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.
A firm has generational culture locked up, and won’t take money for even a low-effort re-release?
Nobody’s being harmed, here.
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.
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!
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.
Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.
Bits have been “fair game” for decades.
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.
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.
Then why should I trust that systems will be built that will protect my future needs?
one could say it seems to already have budged.
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
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.
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.
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.
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...
It costs EA nothing and their owners have funds from sources that make the cat-and-mouse game expensive for the reuploaders.