The eight best racing games of the 2000s

Need For Speed (HP2, U, U2, MW, C)

Ask us to name a better driving simulator and I’ll name you ten. There are few car games however, that affected youth car culture, for better or worse, quite as profoundly as the Need for Speed franchise. To pick one of these games would be to do the others a disservice, so 2002’s Hot Pursuit 2, 2003’s Underground, 2004’s Underground 2, 2005’s Most Wanted and 2006’s Carbon all get their fair mention.

Their reach spans everything from speeding across blazing hot deserts in a Porsche Carrera GT Concept in the supercar extravaganza Hot Pursuit series, to bolting neons onto a 1.1-litre Peugeot 106 in time for a top shelf rag photoshoot – thank you dearly for nurturing the inner chav of a generation, Underground and Underground 2. Whatever your dream car, be it on the cover of Max Power or Evo Magazine, you could enjoy it in the environment it best suited on a Need for Speed game. While the earlier games for the most part stuck to their lanes, Most Wanted and Carbon were fairly convincing amalgamations of the Gumball 3000 and Halfords car park rev-off polar opposite car cultures. For four glorious years NFS stuck to what it was good at – a playful and at times even satirical celebration of different car cultures and honest-to-goodness arcade silliness. Then ProStreet had to try its hand at being a sim the same year Forza Motorsport 2 came out… More on Forza later… but oh dear oh dear.

Gran Turismo 4

Gran Turismo 4 is still in the eyes of many faithful to The Real Driving Simulator, the peak of the franchise. Coming seven years after the original’s release, creator Kazunori Yamauchi’s reportedly infuriating fetishism for depth and detail culminated in a game utterly unrivalled and seemingly generations ahead in terms of graphics, physics, game content, car list and anything else that glues the very best driving games together.

Over 700 cars from 80 manufacturers, spanning over 130 years of motoring’s past, present and future. It had a career so dense that we’d wager less than 0.1 per cent of any who played the game will have got 100 per cent – I certainly didn’t. There was an actual full 24-hour race on the Nürburgring. It was all astonishing at the time and frankly, every entry since has cowered in the shadow of its impact. Not even the additions of Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini and other manufacturers as well as other motorsport disciplines and more have given any newer entries the power and impact Gran Turismo 4 had. Maybe Gran Turismo 7 will do the business when it eventually arrives? Yes, delays are something the old games did well that the new ones do well too...

Read our list of the nine best racing games of all time.

Colin McRae Rally 2.0

With the Mk1 Focus WRC on its cover beside the name of the legend that piloted it, Colin McRae Rally 2.0 saw the title mature and the direction of the games refined. Multiplayer, cleaner menus, better graphics and a variety of cars from that year’s season and before set the tone. This was the successful mould set for the five subsequent rallying games in the series that decade with influence reaching all the way to 2009’s Colin McRae Dirt 2.

Midnight Club

An Underground-style game from the makers of Grand Theft Auto? Sounds like a good idea to us. The Midnight Club games were an exploration of street car culture much like the popular Need For Speed entries but with their own alternate twist and take. None better-exemplify that, than Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition.

This game actually saw Rockstar partner with Dub Magazine on the game’s development, tapping deeper into the world of urban car culture. As well as informing content, their consultancy helped Rockstar keep their finger on the pulse of car culture throughout its development. Sort of like a military contractor consulting on a Call of Duty Modern Warfare game. Producer Jay Panek said: “When they predicted for us over a year ahead of time what cars would be hot by the time Midnight Club 3 released, they were right nine times out of ten”. It’s always a good feeling when a game seemingly ‘knows’ what you want to drive and what you want to get up to. Game development is a long-winded process, so that edge of being able to look ahead to what would engage gamers was invaluable. Midnight Club, especially Dub Edition, is often forgotten about, in the shadow of the NFS Underground games but few have a bad word to say about it. It was an essential title in the culture at the time.

Need to entertain children or brothers and sisters? Read our list of the six best racing games for kids.

Test Drive Unlimited

Then in 2008 the game of car games was changed forever. Test Drive Unlimited featured a one-to-one scale map of the Hawaian Island of Oahu, complete with mountain ranges, urban cityscapes and an intricate web of road network connecting it all. The map was littered with houses you could buy, dealerships you could visit to spec out and buy your cars from and of course a whole slew of races to progress your career. There was pretty much zero story to it – the objective of the game was purely the Hawaian car ownership lifestyle.

Sound a bit stale? Well, now consider the fact you could seamlessly join seven of your friends and drive on hours-long road trips around Oahu with the Massively Open Online Racing system. It was completely revolutionary, truly taking full advantage of the more powerful Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 platforms.

I can say from personal experience, after thousands of hours played, driving thousands of miles, with friends and family alike, this is perhaps my favourite driving game of all time. Five years before Forza Horizon, TDU did it bigger and better by orders of magnitude. Even eight years after the online servers were turned off (RIP), dedicated PC players still host their own servers for modded versions of the original game, 13 years on from its release. Talk about standing the test of time.

Forza Motorsport 2

In 2021, we’re on the eve of the eighth Forza Motorsport release, and the fifth Forza Horizon release. Once out, they’ll be the twelfth and thirteenth entries in the now world-famous and universally beloved Forza franchise. We’re here to talk about the second, released in 2007. Forza Motorsport 2 was the real original pretender to Gran Turismo’s simulator supremacy. It took the pre-established Forza hallmarks of a great car list, superb physics, crisp car sounds, stunning graphics and a compelling career and jolted them up a level for the Xbox 360. The reason we’re highlighting 2? The first entry was great but 2 was proof Forza was here to stay. Believe it or not, the online servers are still up. If you have an Xbox 360 and can get hold of a copy, get on Forza Motorsport 2 for a throwback with some friends. I actually think it has a light-hearted sense of fun the new entries seem to have lost and that the devs would do well to remind themselves of…

Rear our list of the best new racing games coming in 2021.

Burnout Paradise

Along similar lines to TDU but with a more smash-‘em-up vibe was Burnout Paradise. Released in 2008, it was  an open-worlder set in the fictional Paradise City. A fictional car list based loosely on production models affords the crashier style of gameplay, which includes ‘Showtime’ mode, effectively seeing players choreograph spectacular smash-ups. Like TDU, the open-world do-as-you-please nature of the game as well as the seamless multiplayer has cemented its place in the hearts and minds of players. It endured so well that it got a remaster in 2018 for the Xbox One and PS4 and latterly in June 2020, for the Nintendo Switch. That’s what being backed by EA games can get you…

Project Gotham Racing 4

Project Gotham Racing is an old-school franchise. It’s a sim-cade celebration of the hottest sportscars in the world at the given time of release, taking itself not at all too seriously and being all the more fun for it. PGR as a franchise is worthy of mention here but PGR4 takes the cake for one simple reason: it goes unbeaten, even to this day, for the quality of car sounds. Someone at Bizzarre Creations, the developer of PGR4, got the brief of an entirely unserious car game and took the most serious approach to recording car sounds you can imagine. I did some research and found he moved over to working on Forza. Whatever he did for PGR4, he’s not allowed to do it there...

The graphics for the time were incredibly crisp too and the weather system was revolutionary. PGR4 just sticks with you. It has that balance of arcadey fun with delicious visuals and sounds.

So those are our racing game picks of the 2000s. So much changed in such a short space of time, with so many unforgettable titles defining what was perhaps the greatest decade to date in racing games. Yes, the last decade gave us incredible graphics and more computing power… but some soul has gone missing, I’d wager. Do you agree? Let us know.