A Fan Recompiled Need for Speed Underground 2 to Run in Your Browser
Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
A fan project recompiles the original PC code of Need for Speed Underground 2 to run in Chrome and Firefox at up to 120 fps in widescreen, with free roam, online races, and support for controllers, wheels, and touch. Over 10,000 players were online at once. The creator built it so he and his brother could play together again, roughly 20 years after they first did. It's free, with no microtransactions.
My brother and I played this game together about 20 years ago. Because of that I tried porting it to the browser so we could play together again. It worked surprisingly well, and it got a bit out of hand.
- Dathuil
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?
- macNchz
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…
- popcar2
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:
chromium --enable-unsafe-webgpu --ozone-platform=x11 --use-angle=vulkan --enable-features=Vulkan,VulkanFromANGLE
- alexpadula
That was rather fun in online mode!
- rustyhancock
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.
- donatj
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.
- diegochavarrosu
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.
- whycome
This just shows what's possible. Copyright should be 10 years