The first time I played Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Black Box Studio was already gone. Disbanded. I wanted to give them my money, but there was no one left to take it.
That hit me hard — missing the chance to pay for a childhood favorite.
See, back in the day in China, most of us played this game as a cracked copy. No other way. No official retail. No Steam. No way to pay even if you wanted to. We were kids with dial-up internet and a dream — and a pirated ISO from a local PC café.
So years later, I thought: maybe a physical PS2 import copy would help. A kind of spiritual closure.
Luckily, I didn’t get scammed. Found an old-school seller who knew his stuff. Got it at a fair price. We talked a bit about why I was buying it — he was genuinely happy for me.
Also grabbed a few titles on Steam during sales. Two bucks each on average. Felt good.
I have mixed feelings about this franchise. Part of me still hopes it can rise again. Make something world-changing. Like it once did.
In this case its probably the music licensing not intentional stupidity from EA preventing a re-release.
The only thing preventing a re-release of any of these “EA Trax” era titles is that they’re not willing to pay to renew those licenses.
Usually yes, but sometimes no. For a recent example, all the “cover cars” from past Forza Horizon games are available as loyalty rewards in Forza Horizon 6… except the McLaren Senna from Forza Horizon 4 because the Senna family has decided in the years since FH4 that they will no longer allow anyone but McLaren to use the Senna name for any price. If Playground wanted to remake FH4 they’d have to drop the Senna from the car list, which would be understandable but really disappoint fans. Now I know that that exact scenario is rare, but that’s not the only reason people deny rights to things that they once did: sometimes like Toyota in the 2010s they decide they’d no longer like to be associated with those kinds of games, sometimes even figuring out who owns the rights after decades of mergers, buyouts, and business failures makes things unclear no matter how deep you dig, there’s a lot of ways things like that could go wrong.