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…
> 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.
Indeed. NFS:U2 came out in late Nov 2004, goes double platinum, sells 11M copies and EA shut down online multiplayer in Aug 2006. Reasonable debate can be had about time frames but games out of print over 20 years should be an easy call. The problem isn't just copyright duration, it's also lack of granularity. We need a middle-ground like 'Expanded Fair Use' which kicks in after 20 years and enables non-commercial sharing of the actual code, without also looping in rights to long-lived franchise characters (Mario, Sonic, Zelda) or an entire 'cinematic universe'. It's the 'all-or-nothing' that lets publishers effectively block everything by arguing "But then anyone will be able to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games."
As for "all sorts of cool possibilities", just look at what the retro modding community has already done with HD texture packs, expansions and fan translations.
how would music rights work in such a situation when they were licensed? how much of a game is licensed from someone else? the engine? the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?
I'd argue so! The music producers made their money, the original company made their money. The game isn't sold or updated anymore. Music was part of the game, it stays part of the game. Noone is profiting from it (with this clause, ie: non-commercial is the main thing for community/public domain takeover). For the music and similar assets the clause is usually already clear even nowadys, as long as the music is being displayed alongside the game, it's fine (that's how 99% of the music copyright works nowadays with modern games re streaming, unless the music company is backwards because they are greedy).
We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.
If you are talking about music licensing deals for a specific game, usually they expire after a set amount of time, similar to certain assets like cars. Now if you are talking about the music itself, you have think about the composition rights and performance rights so to speak. The first is tied to the composer and the sheet music while the second could be tied to the people who performed in the actual recording . A particular performance could become abandonware if the master is lost, no reissues are made or the record company is acquired and its records get tangled in legal issues that prevent new reissues. For the second part, a musician can reconstruct the original composition sheet with enough time, but it would hard to replicate the original performance.
Once you start changing the rules you’re no longer constrained by the old rules. Abandonware going free inherently means all the IP used by the game is free to use as part of the game. It doesn’t require individual assets to be free independent of the game.
I don't have all the answers. IP rights are complete shit show. My point was that instead of trying to "fix it all" or "chuck it all" (which I don't think political reality will allow anytime soon), maybe we can start by slicing off a few less contentious, smaller wins (like non-commercial, out-of-print >20 years, code only).
Every sentence you wrote was a question. Do you have a solution to suggest to any of your questions? Or even an idea on how come up with or evaluate proposed solutions to any of them?
> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?
I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to avoid being shut down by that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all. Do you agree more granularity of some kind in copyright would help?
Shouldn't we want anyone to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games? Isn't more creativity literally supposed to be the point of copyright? Is Square harmed if someone makes their own story in the FF6 setting 32 years later (and even if they were, why should we care)? Or even if some random person wants to maintain an old piece of software that they didn't originally write: good!
> Isn't more creativity literally supposed to be the point of copyright?
Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.
The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel mockery of the original intent.
I have no hope this is fixable in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. For decades now, RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major party's IP-related votes (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S government.
Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, most limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than the shit sandwich we have now. The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that even THAT will almost certainly be killed by the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).
They now have an opposition which might have the $$$ and will to fight against copyright: AI lobbyists. The world's richest man owns an AI company. As AI makes people realise just how much everything is a derivative work, and remixes of this nature become easier, I suspect the whole concept of IP is going to change dramatically and more people will question its necessity.
or doesn't abolish all IP rights
While that might not happen fully, AI might be the catalyst driving things in that direction.
american ai companies are hypocrites on that front. they want copyright to not exist when it's them using copyrighted material, but afterwards they fight tooth and nail to enforce their own.
otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.
I think this basically happened because the cost of creation (of what people want to consume, regardless of how you feel about it) went up significantly.
When copyright was invented, it was mostly applied to books (not even book series / franchises), which don't cost that much to write, even if you take printing into account, and are usually written by a single author or a small team.
Nowadays, copyright is applied to huge cinematic and video game universes, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars to make, and don't have a single "author" behind them. It's a very different law for a very different reality.
When Moby Dick was written, Moby Dick was all it was. Nowadays, every new movie in a given universe is intended to bring profits on its own, but, by making that universe more popular, it increases future profits for other things in the franchise too. This is all reflected in the accounting, and requires copyright to be much longer than it once was.
That's why we should simply normalize breaking the law. The war on use of our own cultural history is the same as the war on drugs: indefensible. Our predecessors have decided to make our government into a mockery of what it was supposed to be. So give their laws the respect they deserve: none.
> That's why we should simply normalize breaking the law.
Sure, and that's what anyone into retro gaming or preservation has to do. The problem is that "law" is a legal monopoly on the use of force. So far, the retro preservation community has managed to preserve most of electronic gaming and computing's history up through around ~2010. But only because the technology didn't yet exist to make most 'legacy' digital IPs worth exploiting. There are signs the tacit truce that's existed between retro preservation and rights holders is crumbling.
Interest in retro is booming and Nintendo, EA, Sony and others are increasingly releasing new 'remasters' of retro IP. The same AI tech making decomps/recomps faster and easier for enthusiasts is also shifting the economics of retro monetization for IP rights holders. We can no longer rely on them "looking the other way" and tacitly allowing retro preservation. Rapacious media corporations are determined to squeeze every dollar from the expanded IP rights they paid a lot of political donations to purchase (California senator Nancy Pelosi is retiring a multi-hundred-millionaire). The DMCA and other provisions they bought into law are incredibly expansive. In the past, they had little reason to use them against retro gaming. Now they do.
Sharing tiny ROM files is one of the easiest illegal things to not be caught doing. So is emulator development. If the Switch emulator people had put their git forge on Tor, it'd still be up.
>Shouldn't we want anyone to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games?
We are currently seeing a microcosm of this in the indie space as we speak. I think the answer is a resounding "no". Not unless you can out-advertise all the fake or slop copies out there. The issue is less about the idea of building a moat and more about how it's clear that 99.999% of efforts will be anything but that.
>Or even if some random person wants to maintain an old piece of software that they didn't originally write: good!
Sure. That's pretty much done regardless of publisher intent. Modding is too much of a cat and mouse game to really bother with financially, and online games avoid it by owning the server to operate on.
Isn't that one dependent on a handful of online components they never gave us access to? Either way I'm sure you could just invent your own matching API that works better. Definitely share it when you finish!
It's been.... 13 years since I've bothered, but you'll want to also have it dig through a lot of the calculations/formulas for how things are balanced. No idea if they ever fixed it, but at one point I jokingly set the tax rate to poor people for 20% to get rid of them, and afaict this overflowed how unhappy it made them back into being maximally happy.
Not that it needs to be a perfect, literally multi-agent simulated system but the garbage collection and a few other things operate under the hood on far simpler terms than are reflected visually, IIRC the biggest issue was that the visual representation of the trucks and garbage are an approximation based off of the heat maps which are themselves just an approximation mapped to the buildings from some far simpler terms.
Not sorry to sperg out, I grew up obsessed with SC2k, was like 10 when I bought some 300 page book from B&N that broke down every single mechanic and how it was calculated and the "correct" way to win. 2013 broke my heart, I was so hype for it.
I recall initially playing it pirated back in the day, you'd run an emulator locally for the server component and play offline! We had it back then, probably way easier nowadays (and likely more stable).
I've already something similar - https://city.scaleupcto.com - including datacenters and AI research labs with associated disasters... I have a v2 with multiplayer which I need to finish off, exactly as you describe!
I recall playing the demo level on an Elonex laptop that my brother had for work and we played it repeatedly. When SE came out with the 3DFX support, we were absolutely amazed at the fog and water effects in game.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.
Yeah, same. I jumped in via the website, and after driving around for ~5 minutes the main thing in my head was "damn, this is fun". And now, half my Saturday is gone...
I forget if it was NSFU2 or what but they had this in actual arcade games. For like $2 you could get a smart card to store your account, car, customizations, stats etc. Pop it in and load your ride up and my wife and I put in so many hours in the arcade playing this damn thing.
While many games don't age well I'm confident a surprising number of games can be remastered into a playable state.
1) extract the art (including audio and other fixture data)
2) instrument some kind of parity-checker / validator against the base game
3) /loop to have an agent rebuild the entire game the way you want
The hard part is 2) and push comes to shove you could probably pay a part time high school intern to laboriously go through the game and make sure it is a faithful recreation.
IANAL, art assets are the IP of the creators. It would certainly be illegal to host or otherwise distribute the art assets you do not own. I see the industry coming down HARD on this form of reverse engineering if only because it is so easy.
Game streaming is a massive loss leader (you can see this reflected in the increasingly slim per-month usage limits multiplied by the rising subscription prices), video at scale is far from a solved problem. Even with 8-12 simultaneous encodes per GPU (or iirc about double that from the accelerators) getting the density per rack to actually support the number of concurrent players required to approach being a commercial success is still very far away. This also ignores the very real logistical constraints decently routed bandwidth.
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:
When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following:
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Linux support for WebGPU is incomplete. Other platforms have received more priority and have it enabled by default. Even on platforms where Chrome does support it, the tech isn't available on other browsers necessarily.
I was gonna respond with the generic large swath of unverified code running on your machine, but I realized your question is more specific and more interesting. If anyone knows, I would love to hear an answer on this as well.
Being new, largely untested code paths in the browser, it's very possible for it to have buffer overflow defects that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on your system. So, basically, literally anything could happen.
>But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
Need for Speed is trademarked, and they do actively continue to publish and sell games under that trademark. They don't sell some particular older games, but they definitely do make and distribute videogames games bearing the trademark "Need for Speed".
Massive issue with a game like NFSU2 is all the licensed music. I just watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdLZTgMDd4&t=735s) of an EA producer working on bringing back old games, and he said it took them over a year just to get the music licenses for a 30 year old game. And that's if they can get the licenses. Famously, no one really knows who owns the game No One Lives Forever, and the supposed rights holders aren't particularly interested in digging through their pre-digital legal archives to try to find the required documents that assert those rights.
Games are bundles of licenses themselves. That music costs money, as do other assets and sometimes engines. And over time some of those licenses can expire or require renegotiation. Sometimes it's easier to just stop selling something than figure all that out.
Because this is a billion dollar corporation and those typically hire cutthroat teams that negotiate with other cutthroat companies. I recently tried licensing a 50-year-old unaired raw video from a news corporation. It's in the range of $5-10k. We're talking b-roll with dead air and such.. big companies aren't interested in this stuff
When I opened the game I was waiting for this song, it was ingrained in my memory. It was famously the opening song for the game, and as you put it there is zero chance they will license even that one song just to bring back this game.
Cant they just change to different songs? It's not a crucial aspect to the game to have this particular song. The game still plays well with other music - potentially have new up and coming rappers as replacements for exposure for free even!
I guess the real solution is to make an almost-identical look-a-like version with a new name, thus avoiding enough of the trademark and copyright issues for the publishers to leave well alone.
I can't stop laughing. There's hundreds of cars all spawning at the same time, running routes around the map, all doing burnouts and honking at each other. It's absolute chaos, and 2006 year old me is having so much fun.
Any retail version of this game is mostly unplayable on modern PCs. Really appreciate the nostalgia bomb. I wasted so many hours of my life on this game on the original xbox.
If I were doing this type of re-implementation work I wouldn't even make it publicly available. I'd share it with my friends and keep a lid on it otherwise. Large game publishers seem to have real trouble distinguishing organic IP remixes from outright day-one piracy that costs them revenue and I'd rather not get caught up in the legal dragnet.
Emulators are legally protected and asking for donations is just fine, the fly in the ointment for emulation of modern consoles is that they require firmware and decryption keys extracted from real consoles to actually do their advertised function, the emulator might tell you that it is your responsibility to extract the required files from your own console to protect itself but just like game "backups" it's much easier to download the required files someone else has ripped and uploaded to the internet.
The stupid part was paywalling the latest version of the emulator behind a Patreon subscription which opened them up to being taken down by Nintendo, although it was likely they would have been taken down anyway just because the Switch 2 was nearing launch and they didn't want Switch emulator developers to get started on the Switch 2.
I don't know. You're not asking for donations to keep maintaining a product you don't own. You're asking for donations as someone who put their services to work.
Consider a tricky grey area: you have a patreon for your youtube channel and expect most people to be donating so you can keep making videos (you get maybe, $50 a month). You also make random mods on the side. One of your mods blows up, and you get a bunch of attention. Which includes donators giving you hundreds thanking you for the mod. Are you now taking "blood money" because your tip jar for youtube content now has financial incentives to make more gaming mods?
I personally treat the tip jar as such. As long as you're not saying "pay me this much and I'll make X mod", I'm donating to a person, not a potentially morally grey cause. Maybe the Nintendo lawyer disagree with me, but that feeling has always been mutual.
What is the service here though, if it's not just "here's a way to play a copyrighted game without paying"?
I'm sure this project took a lot of work and effort, but legally/morally speaking that's beside the point of where the value is and who should be charging money for it.
Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy? I'm not sure so many people would be visiting it or posting about it, to me 100% of the value of this site is just being able to play a great game that other people made, for free. The actual emulator itself is almost irrelevant to the value, if you get what I'm saying.
Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies, in theory, if you uploaded one you already owned?
> Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
I think they should be far more worried about the music rights holders than EA. When I fired it up I was greeted to a menu playing The Doors & Snoop Dogg lol
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.
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.
Cam: Some regular person at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.
TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.
Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].
In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.
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 are under public domain. But they still could theoretically distribute them. Theoretically, pretty much anyone could, but most of this list is just essentially lost to time. They couldn't even if they wanted to for a lot of these. They put in a good bit of work to republish and remaster a select few pieces of work forever but the vast majority of stuff just sits and rots. The same is true for videogames. A small slice gets recycled and republished as some retro game pack or whatever. But most of it gets ignored.
But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?
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.
Yeah. We created a culture encouraging people to monetize any and every aspect of our lives. We can't foster that, actively make cost of living worse, and not expect people to to follow suit. Especially on an entrepreneur site like YCombinator.
You want more people doing it for the love of the game? Make sure they don't need to count pennies to pay rent.
When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
Also not sure if you’ve ever been part of a private tracker but there a much higher percentage of users have additional motivation to contribute. Some of that is because contributing provides additional benefits to consumption. But also it’s for the love of the game. The losses of oink and what.cd were a bit like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Those libraries were the cumulative effort of tens of thousands of people sharing and meticulously cataloging. Much closer to maintaining a library or an archive than something like TPB. There is no doubt there is music that is now lost to time which was once dutifully uploaded and then preserved by a seeder on those sites. I personally have uploaded content that is not available to purchase anywhere to their successor.
I was (mistakenly) talking about what motivates people, not the benefits of piracy. The vast majority of people engaging in the practice are doing it to get free media. If someone isn’t even practicing basic 321 I don’t want to hear the word “preservation” or “archive” lol
In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up high-minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small. On the other hand, I also don’t think online piracy inflicts enough harm for it to be necessary to make an excuse.
As for people who make it possible, that’s another thing entirely and I agree!
Agreed! Although i will say i believe you are meaningfully contributing to preservation when you permaseed torrents, especially in private trackers. These are geographically distributed copies available for others to grab and contribute to keeping safe.
Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.
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"
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.
Has NFS: Most Wanted (2005) been ported yet? This is one of my all time faves that never really got a revitalization. There was a remake that did not really stay faithful to the original and is widely considered by fans of the series to be worse than the original.
The Doors/Snoop Dogg "Riders on the Storm" really takes me back. There are some games from that mid-2000s era that really imprinted themselves on my brain, and apparently this is one of them.
The cool part about old games like NFS & GTA Vice City is the vibes they carry. Infrequent updates and awareness of the lack of technology at the time, made our minds set that we've to play them for a long time. Initially they seem boring but coming back from school/work and having a saved world in GTA Vice City was nostalgia.
With the current pace of developments, there is less time to relate with most games because we have updates in <1 year (except Rockstar obv) that changes the experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Works like a charm! Great work. I played this game at 1024x768 a lot back in 2004./2005. during my college days, with a keyboard, on brand new PC (AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512 MB RAM DDR1, ATI Radeon 9600, CRT monitor) which is first PC I bought with my own saved money.
It will remain my all time favorite NFS game, with the best soundtrack.
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.
Check out Mandalore Gaming's older videos. Most of the time he picked old titles and his videos contained segments about which mods and patches to install alongside to make them work better for modern hardware/OS.
The communities playing old games did not need or want versions playable in the browser, they're already playing the games on emulators, source ports, or with community patches for modern systems.
It was possible, devs were just sleeping on WASM. What the LLMs are doing with this shit is trivial that you literally could do in a day by hand. Literally all of the hard work is already done for you/the LLM by the people who implemented C-to-WASM compilation.
Now, please vibecode me a winxp directx driver that serializes calls to its wasm counterpart, to enable graphics acceleration for such VMs. Sounds highly doable: virgl, virtio-gpu and Venus exist. Might be even simpler to do it for Vulkan and port dxvk to XP.
Yes. When you have 15 minutes to play, you just want to open the website and play, no figure out where to torrent things or which emulator works where and fiddling with the settings, etc.
Isn't it ironic that AI goes through such incredible breakthroughs just as the time were society seems so creatively bankrupt with endless movie/game reboots/remakes :)
The absolute nostaliga wave that just hit me playing this. I was visiting family friends over Christmas and this was the game that year. Played it for about 6 hours straight with my brother and our parents friends kids.
Introduced me to so much music that shapped my musical tastes for years afterwards.
I miss this era of games when it felt like there was genuine inovation and competition in games and consoles. THPS2, THUG, Need for Speed. WWE all of them had unbelivable soundtracks and felt like they were trying to push the envelope with new features.
Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
I think it was just more harshly curated through the need of physical media. You needed money to get a production run and a "completed" game to have pressed before you can even see if people want to buy it.
> Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
It was the age of games being so difficult to make that you could only find things that survive the enduring process. There was still shovelware, but it was rare compared to what you find on Steam in 2026.
The original is the best in my book. Understated, placed huge emphasis on the cars and the experience of long GT drive from A to B. Shame they basically abandoned that formula immediately with NFS2.
Those were 2 of my faves, NFSHP2 started a lifelong love of cars and the motorsport! But let's not gloss over the original NFSU - that one changed the game! All the customization options blew my mind as a 10 year old.
Fun fact - the fictional city of Bayview in this game was modeled after Vancouver. Lots of fun Easter eggs to uncover if you are a local and look closely enough.
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!
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!
The game asset is the clear copyright violation, even if the code might be considered a "clean reimplementation" (but this is obviously a derivative work, so definitely not clean).
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).
I loved the original NFS games where you could drive exotic cars in open roads, and didn’t love when they started being about modded regular cars… still had a lot of fun with this Underground 2.
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.
I think it's really cool bringing old games back to life with all the conveniences of the web platform. I did a HoMM3 typescript rewrite with Claude Code recently exactly for this reason: ability to run in the browser, incl mobile devices with cloud saves. But I'm not hosting anything publicly for that
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.
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?
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.
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]
I remember trying to play Need For Speed 1 and that was incredibly sensitive to damage and I found it very difficult compared to 2. Need For Speed 3 changed the default camera angle to make the car take up a lot of the screen. But I remember having a lot of fun with the game. It came with a PC my dad bought but there was zero chance it'd run on that DirectX HAL3D "GPU" and the Cyrix processor in it. Ah, the memories.
They also remember Screamer and Screamer 2 being great around the same time.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
Same, my brother got a copy of nfs3 from “somewhere” and it was the most amazing thing ever. It ran fine in low res software rendering on a celeron with S3 graphics card. I remember when the nfs4 demo came out, enabling 3D acceleration would make some elements disappear and it ran with very low fps.
This is such a fun blast from the past! I remember playing the entire NFS Underground on both the PC and the XBox - it had the most fun gameplay even compared to all the newer, shinier stuff that came later. LLAP.
The best part for me was Riders on the Storm by The Doors. Without NFS I probably would never have come across the song. I still listen to it now and then and it brings back that same feeling every time.
No, my brother, this was simply incredible. The interface for using it on a cell phone blew me away, and the fluidity is amazing, but seeing that multiplayer mode, that truly blew me away.
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.
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.
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.
I really wonder why nobody even bothers to write their own marketing copy for even hobby projects like this. Is there no voice behind the person who decided to build this? What inspired them? Why? It’s just the usual AI language Claude wrote.
Playing in freeplay, I feel like I am Jason Dessen from Dark Matter. So many green Nissan 350Zs. It is impossible to drive a 100ft without hitting someone like me.
I found the Corsica training map to be incredibly difficult when they were trying to train you how to do S-curves and I kept trying to drove around the bends instead of doing a straight line. Ever since then, I've taken roundabouts in the UK like S-curves.
I really wish we could do stuff like this without worrying about getting sued. Like, think about it. The copyright for games is extremely long (I won't google it) yet they only have a short period where they make money. All that work went into those games that are no longer financially viable. But no one can do anything with them due to copyright.
I've thought about this so much as I'm building my own game. I see all these amazing assets in older works like music, 3d models, textures, and so on, yet if you use any of it you're just going to get sued. I feel like there could be a good middle ground that might work for the publisher better than just keeping everything in a warehouse...
This website here is likely to be sent some not-so-polite emails soon telling them to take it down as they don't own the assets...
It's not that hard to get crypto, pay for a VPS while using a decent VPN (the VPS itself probably dodgy and bugged by the operators; but oh well), buy a non-Verisign/etc domain, and have it up on the internet.
Especially with the rise of AI/LLM spam, you might get a DMCA or cease and desist, but the third party contracted by $RIGHTSHOLDER isn't going to go NSA-level de-anonymisation as long as you stay small scale.
After all, it is still relatively trivial to find whatever movies, TV shows, etc online from a web browser. Yandex is convenient, but DeepSeek Search API is also decent (and very cheap) too.
It makes me sad to see the Pontiac billboards. GM needs to do some necromancy and bring them back from the dead.
Potentially controversial opinion but I think the WS6 has aged extremely well compared to a lot of other designs of 02-03. Those ram air scoops still look cool as fuck
Awesome. Of course take down will follow. But sure you can prompt it to change it to a completely different racing game with ai generated assets only. There will be a massive amount of clones coming from every possible game you can think of. Where lies the border of legality.
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
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.
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.
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.
> why would anyone pay for a game running in a browser?
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser? Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games. The top games on Twitch are World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft -- all trivial to build in the browser.
But browser gaming isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play this pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download this pirated game".
Piracy didn't kill the gaming industry. I think the bigger threat is indie games that are trivial to clone with AI.
It didn't outright kill it, but it did have a negative effect on it, and this effect might get a lot worse now with LLMs cracking various copy protection mechanisms.
> 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.
> 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...
> 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...
Because the lawyers can for example, argue that their current games can be future targets of unauthorized recomp'd redistributions that will impact the sales of the business.
Nintendo also sells and offers old games digitally and they have the correct rights in redistributing them which this still counts as a "actively commercial game" even if it is old.
These companies don't care about ripped and recompiled games if it is done for private use. They only care if the game and its assets are redistributed in an unauthorized manner.
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.
I just played it, worked awesome and was pretty fun. If it uses the original game assets then it's a pretty clear copyright violation, I'm not sure if AI is able to produce the same level of artwork and gameplay so I'm not sure if there's anything the author can do to avoid being copyright infringement.
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…
Indeed. NFS:U2 came out in late Nov 2004, goes double platinum, sells 11M copies and EA shut down online multiplayer in Aug 2006. Reasonable debate can be had about time frames but games out of print over 20 years should be an easy call. The problem isn't just copyright duration, it's also lack of granularity. We need a middle-ground like 'Expanded Fair Use' which kicks in after 20 years and enables non-commercial sharing of the actual code, without also looping in rights to long-lived franchise characters (Mario, Sonic, Zelda) or an entire 'cinematic universe'. It's the 'all-or-nothing' that lets publishers effectively block everything by arguing "But then anyone will be able to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games."
As for "all sorts of cool possibilities", just look at what the retro modding community has already done with HD texture packs, expansions and fan translations.
Shouldn't trademarks basically take care of this?
FWIW patents usually also expire after 20 years.
We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.
Every sentence you wrote was a question. Do you have a solution to suggest to any of your questions? Or even an idea on how come up with or evaluate proposed solutions to any of them?
> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?
I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to avoid being shut down by that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all. Do you agree more granularity of some kind in copyright would help?
Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.
The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel mockery of the original intent.
I have no hope this is fixable in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. For decades now, RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major party's IP-related votes (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S government.
Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, most limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than the shit sandwich we have now. The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that even THAT will almost certainly be killed by the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).
They now have an opposition which might have the $$$ and will to fight against copyright: AI lobbyists. The world's richest man owns an AI company. As AI makes people realise just how much everything is a derivative work, and remixes of this nature become easier, I suspect the whole concept of IP is going to change dramatically and more people will question its necessity.
or doesn't abolish all IP rights
While that might not happen fully, AI might be the catalyst driving things in that direction.
otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.
When copyright was invented, it was mostly applied to books (not even book series / franchises), which don't cost that much to write, even if you take printing into account, and are usually written by a single author or a small team.
Nowadays, copyright is applied to huge cinematic and video game universes, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars to make, and don't have a single "author" behind them. It's a very different law for a very different reality.
When Moby Dick was written, Moby Dick was all it was. Nowadays, every new movie in a given universe is intended to bring profits on its own, but, by making that universe more popular, it increases future profits for other things in the franchise too. This is all reflected in the accounting, and requires copyright to be much longer than it once was.
Sure, and that's what anyone into retro gaming or preservation has to do. The problem is that "law" is a legal monopoly on the use of force. So far, the retro preservation community has managed to preserve most of electronic gaming and computing's history up through around ~2010. But only because the technology didn't yet exist to make most 'legacy' digital IPs worth exploiting. There are signs the tacit truce that's existed between retro preservation and rights holders is crumbling.
Interest in retro is booming and Nintendo, EA, Sony and others are increasingly releasing new 'remasters' of retro IP. The same AI tech making decomps/recomps faster and easier for enthusiasts is also shifting the economics of retro monetization for IP rights holders. We can no longer rely on them "looking the other way" and tacitly allowing retro preservation. Rapacious media corporations are determined to squeeze every dollar from the expanded IP rights they paid a lot of political donations to purchase (California senator Nancy Pelosi is retiring a multi-hundred-millionaire). The DMCA and other provisions they bought into law are incredibly expansive. In the past, they had little reason to use them against retro gaming. Now they do.
We are currently seeing a microcosm of this in the indie space as we speak. I think the answer is a resounding "no". Not unless you can out-advertise all the fake or slop copies out there. The issue is less about the idea of building a moat and more about how it's clear that 99.999% of efforts will be anything but that.
>Or even if some random person wants to maintain an old piece of software that they didn't originally write: good!
Sure. That's pretty much done regardless of publisher intent. Modding is too much of a cat and mouse game to really bother with financially, and online games avoid it by owning the server to operate on.
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
It's been.... 13 years since I've bothered, but you'll want to also have it dig through a lot of the calculations/formulas for how things are balanced. No idea if they ever fixed it, but at one point I jokingly set the tax rate to poor people for 20% to get rid of them, and afaict this overflowed how unhappy it made them back into being maximally happy.
Not that it needs to be a perfect, literally multi-agent simulated system but the garbage collection and a few other things operate under the hood on far simpler terms than are reflected visually, IIRC the biggest issue was that the visual representation of the trucks and garbage are an approximation based off of the heat maps which are themselves just an approximation mapped to the buildings from some far simpler terms.
Not sorry to sperg out, I grew up obsessed with SC2k, was like 10 when I bought some 300 page book from B&N that broke down every single mechanic and how it was calculated and the "correct" way to win. 2013 broke my heart, I was so hype for it.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
1) extract the art (including audio and other fixture data)
2) instrument some kind of parity-checker / validator against the base game
3) /loop to have an agent rebuild the entire game the way you want
The hard part is 2) and push comes to shove you could probably pay a part time high school intern to laboriously go through the game and make sure it is a faithful recreation.
IANAL, art assets are the IP of the creators. It would certainly be illegal to host or otherwise distribute the art assets you do not own. I see the industry coming down HARD on this form of reverse engineering if only because it is so easy.
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/
EDIT: Shit, this is really going to incentivize game-streaming platforms (a la Google Stadia) and disincentivize gaming clients.
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
1. Copy NVIDIA’s Vulkan manifest to a filename Chrome’s sandbox permits:
2. Launch Chrome with NVIDIA-only Vulkan enumeration and forced WebGPU interop: And then now I just have my chrome launcher store that environment variable with the feature set via chrome://flags/#force-enable-webgpu-interop(Note: running proprietary RPMFusion Nvidia drivers on Fedora KDE Wayland)
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Thanks.
Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!
Oops, meant to reply to the GP.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed/need-for-speed-unbou...
This same failure to defend concept doesn't apply to copyright, at all.
First song that played (for me?) was Snoop Dogg feat. The Doors. Absolutely zero chance. There's a reason they won't/can't rerelease the game.
Any retail version of this game is mostly unplayable on modern PCs. Really appreciate the nostalgia bomb. I wasted so many hours of my life on this game on the original xbox.
Whoa!
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
(Recommend turning on ghost mode! There's literally thousands of other players.)
But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
The stupid part was paywalling the latest version of the emulator behind a Patreon subscription which opened them up to being taken down by Nintendo, although it was likely they would have been taken down anyway just because the Switch 2 was nearing launch and they didn't want Switch emulator developers to get started on the Switch 2.
Consider a tricky grey area: you have a patreon for your youtube channel and expect most people to be donating so you can keep making videos (you get maybe, $50 a month). You also make random mods on the side. One of your mods blows up, and you get a bunch of attention. Which includes donators giving you hundreds thanking you for the mod. Are you now taking "blood money" because your tip jar for youtube content now has financial incentives to make more gaming mods?
I personally treat the tip jar as such. As long as you're not saying "pay me this much and I'll make X mod", I'm donating to a person, not a potentially morally grey cause. Maybe the Nintendo lawyer disagree with me, but that feeling has always been mutual.
I'm sure this project took a lot of work and effort, but legally/morally speaking that's beside the point of where the value is and who should be charging money for it.
Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy? I'm not sure so many people would be visiting it or posting about it, to me 100% of the value of this site is just being able to play a great game that other people made, for free. The actual emulator itself is almost irrelevant to the value, if you get what I'm saying.
Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies, in theory, if you uploaded one you already owned?
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
> Help, bugs and questions: our Discord. > Rights holders: legal (at) nfsu2.xyz.
I wonder if the email just goes to /dev/null
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.
Cam: Some regular person at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.
TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.
Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].
In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.
[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...
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.
So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...
But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
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.
You want more people doing it for the love of the game? Make sure they don't need to count pennies to pay rent.
donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up high-minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small. On the other hand, I also don’t think online piracy inflicts enough harm for it to be necessary to make an excuse.
As for people who make it possible, that’s another thing entirely and I agree!
Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.
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"
Came here to make this exact comment. So good.
With the current pace of developments, there is less time to relate with most games because we have updates in <1 year (except Rockstar obv) that changes the experience.
Couldn't the same be said when the PS2 came?
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.
It will remain my all time favorite NFS game, with the best soundtrack.
Now, please vibecode me a winxp directx driver that serializes calls to its wasm counterpart, to enable graphics acceleration for such VMs. Sounds highly doable: virgl, virtio-gpu and Venus exist. Might be even simpler to do it for Vulkan and port dxvk to XP.
Introduced me to so much music that shapped my musical tastes for years afterwards.
I miss this era of games when it felt like there was genuine inovation and competition in games and consoles. THPS2, THUG, Need for Speed. WWE all of them had unbelivable soundtracks and felt like they were trying to push the envelope with new features.
Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
It was the age of games being so difficult to make that you could only find things that survive the enduring process. There was still shovelware, but it was rare compared to what you find on Steam in 2026.
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!
> The game's x86 code is translated to C ahead of time and compiled to WebAssembly.
So they decompiled the x86 into C which was fully able to be recompiled to WASM?
I'm also not sure of the legal repercussions...
[0] https://github.com/th0mk/nfsu2-web
Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.
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.
Bits have been “fair game” for decades.
one could say it seems to already have budged.
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?
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.
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
So nice to see this work in a browser on my ancient smart phone without any issue.
They also remember Screamer and Screamer 2 being great around the same time.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
Second, accepting donations for an EA game might be a bad idea; the recompile itself freely accessible without donations might stay around.
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.
Or maybe that just dates me
Anyway I found it here: https://soundcloud.com/arikitaru/sets/need-for-speed-undergr...
it's missing snoop dogg's "riders on the storm" though, that one's here: https://soundcloud.com/snoopdogg/riders-on-the-storm-fredwre...
My Pentium 4 + Geforce 6600 was struuuugling!
Which I guess is cool that LLMs can compile stuff to wasm, but there is absolutely nothing new, interesting or good about this.
We had piracy before. The only thing that changed is that it is packaged into an html wrapper now
Thank you, EA.
I've thought about this so much as I'm building my own game. I see all these amazing assets in older works like music, 3d models, textures, and so on, yet if you use any of it you're just going to get sued. I feel like there could be a good middle ground that might work for the publisher better than just keeping everything in a warehouse...
This website here is likely to be sent some not-so-polite emails soon telling them to take it down as they don't own the assets...
Especially with the rise of AI/LLM spam, you might get a DMCA or cease and desist, but the third party contracted by $RIGHTSHOLDER isn't going to go NSA-level de-anonymisation as long as you stay small scale.
After all, it is still relatively trivial to find whatever movies, TV shows, etc online from a web browser. Yandex is convenient, but DeepSeek Search API is also decent (and very cheap) too.
Potentially controversial opinion but I think the WS6 has aged extremely well compared to a lot of other designs of 02-03. Those ram air scoops still look cool as fuck
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.
Second that, and we'd get higher quality assets. Game engines could be rewritten/rewired to support ray-tracing and what not. Exciting.
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.
> yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Not all people, especially not if piracy is easy.
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser? Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games. The top games on Twitch are World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft -- all trivial to build in the browser.
But browser gaming isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play this pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download this pirated game".
Piracy didn't kill the gaming industry. I think the bigger threat is indie games that are trivial to clone with AI.
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...
Because the lawyers can for example, argue that their current games can be future targets of unauthorized recomp'd redistributions that will impact the sales of the business.
Nintendo also sells and offers old games digitally and they have the correct rights in redistributing them which this still counts as a "actively commercial game" even if it is old.
These companies don't care about ripped and recompiled games if it is done for private use. They only care if the game and its assets are redistributed in an unauthorized manner.
It costs EA nothing and their owners have funds from sources that make the cat-and-mouse game expensive for the reuploaders.
Disclaimer: instant start game after loading.
add ?host=1 to start a LAN/WAN game and share the link.
https://imgur.com/a/WSRTF7h
Seems like it's been recompiled for wasm, but how was the server built and free roam multiplayer implemented?
Lots and lots of vibecoding.
Online needs reimplementation, with matchmaking instead of lobby list, and matching cars, otherwise it is not fun.
Graphics (WebGPU)
Firefox for Android has no WebGPU yet. Play in Chrome.GPU-OFF-FIREFOX-ANDROID