Trivia / Need for Speed: Underground

• Cash-Cow Franchise: Outside of being part of the massively popular Need for Speed franchise, the Underground games themselves were the among the most successful entries in the series, with the first Underground selling fifteen million copies and Underground 2 selling eleven million copies.
• Fake American: British model Kelly Brook plays Nikki Morris, and speaks with an American accent while playing her, although sometimes she slips off.
• In Memoriam: In the Beacon Hill area of Underground 2, you'll find the Brad Lawless Memorial Park, and a statue dedicated to him. Lawless was an EA developer who died six months before the game's release, and the park was named in his honour.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Neither of the games ever got a digital re-release so the only way to legally obtain the games today is by buying used retail copies from second-hand market.
• Missing Episode: The BREW versions of Underground 2 (and Most Wanted) was considered lost for a time as they were offered exclusively through Verizon's VCAST service, and the game's levels were downloaded ad-hoc instead of being stored all at once due to memory limitations, which resulted in most if not all of the game's data being lost to time when the VCAST service was discontinued in 2012. Fortunately a debug build of the game compiled for Windows surfaced in 2020 from an anonymous source, though it is still missing some tracks.
• Newbie Boom: It can be said that NFS received a large one when it shifted focus to tuners and aftermarket customization in the Underground games, during the early days of The Fast and the Furious franchise.
• Recycled Set:
  • The prologue of Underground 2 supposedly shows the player racing around Olympic City (the setting of the first Underground), but rather than actually recreate Olympic City, the game obviously uses Bayview as the background set.
  • Much of the levels from the BREW version of Underground 2 were sourced from PS1-era Need for Speed games, according to a fan site. Not only did EA provide Ideaworks with some reference assets from High Stakes, the source code to said game was also reused and adapted for BREW as well.
• Real Song Theme Tune: Underground has "Get Low" by Lil' Jon & The Eastside Boyz featuring the Ying Yang Twins; Underground 2 has the "Fredwreck Remix" of The Doors' classic "Riders on the Storm", with special rap lyrics by Snoop Dogg.
• Reclusive Artist: Unlike later Need for Speed games, which cast relatively well-known actresses as the player's female companion, the actresses who played Samantha and Melissa in the first Underground, Cindy Johnson and Amy Walz, were two models that pretty much dropped off the radar shortly after the game's release. Among the very few things known about them is that each appeared on at least one other work aside from Underground (Johnson in the video game Def Jam: Fight for NY and Walz in the film A Beautiful Mind), making them Two-Hit Wonders.
• Two-Hit Wonder:
  • Playing Melissa in the first Underground game is one of only two roles that Amy Walz is known for (or in fact, is known to have ever played), the other being "Blonde in Bar", the blonde in a bar that Dr. John Nash uses to explain the Nash Equilibrium in A Beautiful Mind.
  • Cindy Johnson, who provided her likeness for Samantha, in known to only have appeared in two video games: Underground, and as Cindy J in Def Jam: Fight for NY (also published by EA).
• What Could Have Been:
  • For the first Underground, it was announced in the April of 2003 with planned release date of April 2004, but was pushed forward to November 2003 just in time for the 2003 holiday season. The following reasons could have been that was shown in the earlier builds of the game but were scrapped or changed in the retail version:
    • The Mini Cooper was meant to be featured in the game, but only its logo files remain here. The car's texture and model files don't exist, however.
    • Eddie's iconic Nissan Skyline was originally yellow, and had "Grifter" written on the side of his car instead of "Eastsiders", meaning Grifter was likely the early name for the Eastsiders.
    • The HUD would originally blur when using nitrous, as seen in early videos and screenshots.
    • Smoke would show after crashing in a drag race.
    • The game's logo was originally very different, as seen in some early trailers.
    • As seen in early screenshots, fire was originally used as turn signs behind the road.
    • The earliest HUD used a darker shade of blue, and some elements used the font Impact. Also, the mini map was originally colored dark blue, and drag races originally showed a straight line on the right side with "Start" and "Finish" text at the start and finish lines.
    • In slightly later screenshots, the HUD looked more like the PlayStation 2 demo, except the track map was still dark blue.
    • The road reflections were much brighter.
    • Shaking effects were much more-intense during drag races.
    • The turn signs behind the track were originally yellow. The track barriers were different as well.
    • A completely different stormy gray skybox was used on all maps.
    • Maps are less detailed with different environmental textures and are less colorful.
    • A different fog effect was present.
    • A starting grid that was displayed at the bottom of the screen before races was removed.
  • Underground 2 would have a Hotter and Sexier intro scene which was scrapped (but leaked) as the scene alone would jack the age ratings up.
  • Rachel's car in Underground 2 was originally supposed to be a red Mazda RX-8, as evidenced by the cutscene of the player pulling into the garage with Rachel's car showing them sitting inside such a car. The idea was repurposed for the next game, Most Wanted (2005), where a red RX-8 is driven by Mia.
• You Sound Familiar: Sharon Alexander, who voices Samantha, also voiced the County Dispatch officer in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2.

---