Quick Bio
| Detail | Info |
| Chinese Name | 极品飞车 (Jípǐn Fēichē / Jipinfeiche) |
| English Name | Need for Speed (NFS) |
| Meaning | “Top-Grade Flying Car” / “Ultimate Racing Car” |
| Developer | EA Canada, EA Black Box, Criterion Games, Ghost Games, TiMi Studio |
| Publisher | Electronic Arts (EA) |
| First Release | 1994 — Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed |
| Latest Main Entry | Need for Speed: Unbound (2022) |
| Total Copies Sold | Over 150 million worldwide |
| Platforms | PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Mobile |
| Genre | Racing / Street Racing |
| Series Total Games | 20+ titles across three decades |
| Chinese Market Partner | Tencent (TiMi Studio) |
| Anniversary | 30 years in 2024 |
Introduction: The Racing Franchise That Speaks Chinese Fluently
There is a phrase in Chinese that perfectly captures what this game series has always been about.
极品飞车. Say it out loud: Jípǐn Fēichē. Break it apart and you get something close to “top-grade flying car” or “the ultimate racing machine.” Three characters that somehow say in Mandarin what the English title says in four words. The speed. The quality. The feeling of a car leaving the ground.
Need for Speed — universally known in China as Jipinfeiche — is one of the most successful video game franchises in history. Over thirty years of releases. More than 150 million copies sold across every major platform. Dozens of titles spanning street racing, open worlds, police chases, and underground car culture. A series that made an entire generation of players fall in love with cars they had never driven and roads they had never seen.
But the story of Jipinfeiche is bigger than any single game. It is the story of how a racing franchise survived multiple studio changes, shifting gaming fashions, brutal critical reviews, and near-death creative moments — and kept coming back. It is the story of how a game built in Canada in 1994 became a household name in Shanghai, Beijing, and every Chinese gaming café in between. And it is the story of what happens when a Western franchise genuinely earns its place in the Chinese market rather than simply appearing there.
This article tells that full story.
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Where It Began: The 1994 Original That Started Everything
To understand Jipinfeiche, you have to go back to a simpler time.
In 1994, Electronic Arts released Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console, with PC and PlayStation versions following in 1995 and 1996. The game was built around a concept that sounds obvious now but felt genuinely fresh at the time: real cars, real roads, real speed.
Most racing games of the era were abstract. They featured made-up vehicles on made-up tracks, optimized for gameplay mechanics rather than any illusion of reality. Need for Speed did something different. It licensed real cars — Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis, Dodge Vipers — and put players behind the wheel of machines they had only ever seen in magazines.
The game also included documentary-style car profiles with real footage and specifications, presented as though the player were watching an automotive television program. It was partly a game and partly a love letter to car culture. Players who cared about the difference between a 512 TR and a 911 Turbo found something that respected their knowledge. Players who had never thought about cars found themselves caring about them for the first time.
The sequel, Need for Speed II, arrived in 1997 and expanded the car roster. Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit in 1998 introduced the police chase mechanic that would become one of the franchise’s defining signatures — the thrill of running from law enforcement at speeds that made every corner terrifying. Players could race as either the street racer trying to escape or the cop trying to catch them. That duality captured something about the series’ soul: it was never purely about winning races. It was about the chase.
The Golden Era: Underground Through Carbon
Ask any longtime Jipinfeiche fan what their favorite period of the franchise is and a majority will give you the same answer: the EA Black Box era of the early-to-mid 2000s.
Need for Speed: Underground, released in 2003, was a genuine cultural event. It arrived at the peak of the street racing craze kicked off by The Fast and the Furious film franchise. Everything about it was tuned to the moment — the neon-lit nighttime city streets, the custom modification culture, the hip-hop and electronic soundtrack, the sense that street racing was not just a hobby but a whole way of life.
Underground let players tear apart and rebuild their cars from the ground up. New bumpers, spoilers, paint jobs, decals, engine upgrades, suspension tuning, nitrous oxide systems — the depth of customization was staggering for its time. You did not just race in Underground. You built something. Your car became a statement about who you were and what you valued.
Underground 2 in 2004 added an open world city to explore freely between races — a significant expansion that made the game feel genuinely alive rather than menu-driven.
Then came Most Wanted in 2005. This is the game that many consider the creative peak of the entire franchise. It combined everything the series had developed — the police chase tension of Hot Pursuit, the customization depth of Underground, the open world freedom of Underground 2 — and tied it together with a narrative about climbing a blacklist of the city’s most feared street racers. The Blacklist was a genius motivation device. Every race felt like it mattered. Every police chase felt like survival.
Carbon in 2006 continued the story. ProStreet in 2007 attempted a pivot toward legal track racing that divided the community. Undercover in 2008 returned to street themes but drew mixed reviews. The Black Box era was beginning to show cracks.
The Criterion Years and Creative Reinvention
As the 2010s approached, Electronic Arts handed the series to Criterion Games — the British studio behind the Burnout franchise, known for its breathlessly fast, crash-happy approach to arcade racing.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit in 2010 was a genuine reset. Rather than trying to continue the underground street culture narrative, it stripped the franchise back to its original tension — cars versus cops, pure and simple, on the most beautiful roads imaginable. The Seacrest County setting looked like someone had poured every aspirational driving road from the Swiss Alps and Pacific Coast Highway into a single fictional landscape.
It won racing game of the year recognition across multiple publications and reminded players and critics why the franchise had mattered in the first place.
Most Wanted in 2012 — a soft reimagining of the 2005 classic — pushed the open world concept further, allowing players to find and commandeer cars hidden throughout the city rather than building a single vehicle. It was polarizing among fans of the original but technically impressive.
Criterion’s run showed that the franchise could still produce moments of genuine brilliance when the creative team had clear vision and strong execution.
The Ghost Games Period and Near-Death Experience
Ghost Games took over development in 2013 and produced several entries that form perhaps the most complicated chapter in the franchise’s history.
Rivals in 2013 was well-received, blending the cop-versus-racer mechanic with a persistent online world. But the unnamed 2015 Need for Speed reboot — which required an always-online internet connection even for solo play — infuriated players. Always-on requirements in single-player games remain one of gaming’s most controversial practices, and the community response was loud.
Payback in 2017 tried a cinematic heist-movie approach with a story-driven campaign. The mechanics were solid but the narrative felt thin compared to the ambition. Heat in 2019 returned to the day-night dynamic — racing legally during the day, underground at night while evading increasingly aggressive police — and was received as a genuine step forward.
These were years when the franchise felt uncertain of its own identity. Each game tried something different. Each attracted its own defenders and critics. The series was financially viable but creatively restless.
Unbound and the Latest Chapter
Need for Speed: Unbound, released in November 2022, represented yet another creative pivot — this time embracing anime-influenced visual effects layered over realistic car models, developed by Criterion Games returning to the franchise after their earlier Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted work.
The visual style was genuinely distinctive and divisive. Abstract graffiti art-style effects burst from cars during drifts and boosts, mixing hyperrealistic vehicle models with stylized cel-shaded characters and environments. Some players loved the energy and creativity. Others found the combination jarring.
The game featured Lakeshore City — a fictional American metropolis — with a risk-reward structure that genuinely escalated tension throughout the campaign. Police aggression increased the longer you stayed out racing. Getting caught carried real consequences. The stakes felt meaningful in ways that some recent entries had lacked.
Jipinfeiche in China: A Love Story Between a Franchise and a Market
The Chinese relationship with Need for Speed — Jipinfeiche — deserves its own dedicated discussion because it represents something genuinely remarkable in gaming history.
China has one of the world’s largest gaming populations. The country’s gaming culture developed rapidly through the late 1990s and 2000s, centered heavily on internet cafés where millions of young people accessed games on shared computers. Need for Speed was perfectly suited to that environment. It ran on modest hardware. It was visually spectacular. It could be played in sessions of any length. And it represented something aspirational — fast cars, freedom, a world of chrome and speed that felt thrillingly distant from everyday life.
Jipinfeiche became embedded in Chinese gaming culture in a way few Western franchises achieved. The characters — 极品飞车 — became synonymous with racing games broadly. Saying “jipinfeiche” in a gaming context was like saying “Xerox” instead of “photocopy.” The brand name became a category name.
Electronic Arts recognized this relationship and worked to cultivate it rather than simply exploit it. Tencent, the dominant force in Chinese gaming, became a key partner for China-specific Need for Speed projects. Need for Speed Online — a massively multiplayer online version developed specifically for the Chinese market — ran from 2017 to 2022, serving millions of Chinese players with content and features tailored to local preferences.
The announcement at Auto China 2024 of Need for Speed: Assemble — developed by Tencent’s TiMi Studio, the team behind Honor of Kings and major portions of PUBG Mobile — embedded the franchise directly into Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Players in China with third-generation MBUX-equipped Mercedes cars could play an open-world NFS experience from their dashboard. The Chinese name remained 极品飞车集结. The legacy of the characters persisted.
This partnership was historically significant: it was the first time an automobile manufacturer had collaborated with both a major game publisher and a platform developer to deliver a flagship racing game as in-car entertainment. The franchise that had spent thirty years putting players behind virtual steering wheels was now inside real ones.
What Makes Jipinfeiche Last: The Elements That Define the Series
Across thirty years and wildly different creative visions, a few things have remained constant about Need for Speed — and these constants explain why the franchise has endured where others have faded.
The car selection. From the earliest licensed Ferraris in 1994 to the curated garage of Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bugattis, and modified street machines in recent entries, Need for Speed has always treated cars as objects of genuine desire rather than mere game assets. Players care about which car they are driving because the franchise communicates that the choice matters.
The police tension. Hot Pursuit established it. Most Wanted perfected it. Across every era, the franchise returns to this dynamic: the pursuit, the chase, the near-miss escape. No other major racing franchise has built this mechanic as consistently or as effectively into its identity.
The customization depth. From the underground era onward, Need for Speed made car modification culturally central. The ability to transform a stock vehicle into a personal statement through visual and mechanical customization gave players ownership over their experience in a way that pure racing simulators never quite replicated.
The accessibility. Need for Speed has never been a pure simulation. It sits in that space between arcade immediacy and realistic handling — close enough to reality to feel serious, loose enough to be instantly enjoyable. That balance has kept it accessible across hardware generations, skill levels, and cultural contexts.
Final Words
Thirty years is a long time in video games. Most franchises do not last a decade. Those that reach three decades typically do so by finding a formula and repeating it safely until the audience drifts away.
Need for Speed — Jipinfeiche — has survived not through formula but through reinvention. Sometimes the reinvention worked brilliantly. Sometimes it missed the mark badly. But the willingness to keep trying new things, to hand the franchise to different creative teams with genuinely different visions, has kept it alive and occasionally extraordinary across a span of time that has seen entire gaming platforms rise and disappear.
The Chinese name captures something essential. 极品飞车. Top-grade flying car. There is aspiration in those characters. A sense that this is not just any car — it is the ultimate one. Not just any speed — but the kind that makes the ground disappear beneath you.
That feeling, delivered in 1994 to a small audience of 3DO owners and now available to Mercedes drivers in Shanghai at the push of a button, is what Need for Speed has always been about.
The franchise is still flying.
FAQs
1. What does “jipinfeiche” mean in English?
Jipinfeiche (极品飞车, pronounced Jípǐn Fēichē) is the Chinese name for the Need for Speed racing game franchise. The characters translate approximately as “top-grade flying car” or “ultimate racing machine.” 极品 means top-grade or premium quality; 飞车 means flying car or racing vehicle. Together they capture the speed and prestige at the heart of the franchise.
2. When did Need for Speed first release?
The first Need for Speed game — Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed — was released in 1994 for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console, with PC and PlayStation ports following in 1995 and 1996. It was developed by EA Canada and published by Electronic Arts.
3. How many Need for Speed games have been made?
The franchise has produced over 20 main series titles across three decades. From the original 1994 release through Need for Speed: Unbound in 2022, multiple studios have developed entries across every major gaming platform including PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo consoles, and mobile devices.
4. How many copies has Need for Speed sold worldwide?
The Need for Speed franchise has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling racing game series in video game history. The series celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2024.
5. What is the most popular Need for Speed game?
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) is widely regarded as the franchise’s creative peak. It combined police chase mechanics, open world freedom, and a compelling blacklist progression system into what many fans consider the definitive NFS experience. Underground (2003) and Hot Pursuit (2010) are also consistently cited as fan favorites.
6. Why is Need for Speed so popular in China?
Need for Speed gained massive popularity in China during the internet café gaming era of the late 1990s and 2000s. Its combination of accessible gameplay, spectacular visuals, and aspirational car culture resonated deeply with Chinese gaming audiences. The franchise’s Chinese name — Jipinfeiche — became synonymous with racing games broadly, embedding the brand into Chinese gaming culture at a fundamental level.
7. Who developed the Chinese version of Need for Speed?
Tencent, through its TiMi Studio subsidiary, developed China-specific Need for Speed titles in partnership with Electronic Arts. These include Need for Speed Online (2017–2022), a Chinese-market-exclusive MMO, and the in-development Need for Speed: Assemble, announced in partnership with Mercedes-Benz at Auto China 2024.
8. What was the Mercedes-Benz Need for Speed partnership about?
At Auto China 2024, Mercedes-Benz, Tencent, and Electronic Arts announced that Need for Speed: Assemble would be available to play inside Mercedes-Benz vehicles equipped with third-generation MBUX systems in China via over-the-air updates. It represented the first automotive manufacturer partnership of this kind in the franchise’s history.
9. What happened to Need for Speed after Ghost Games?
After Ghost Games developed several entries including Rivals, Payback, and Heat, Criterion Games — the British studio behind Burnout and the acclaimed Hot Pursuit reboot in 2010 — returned to develop Need for Speed: Unbound, released in November 2022. However, as of 2025, Criterion has been absorbed into EA’s Battlefield development structure, creating uncertainty about the franchise’s next direction.
10. What makes the police chase mechanic special in Need for Speed?
The police pursuit system, introduced in Hot Pursuit (1998) and refined across multiple entries, creates a tension unique in racing games. Players must manage their speed, route planning, and escape timing against increasingly aggressive and coordinated police responses. Getting caught carries genuine gameplay consequences. The mechanic transforms standard racing into something closer to a thriller film — every straightaway is an escape attempt, every corner a potential trap.
11. How does Need for Speed differ from other racing games like Gran Turismo or Forza?
Need for Speed sits between pure arcade racing and full simulation. Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport prioritize realistic physics modeling and motorsport accuracy. Need for Speed prioritizes accessible handling, street racing culture, police tension, and customization depth. It is designed to be immediately enjoyable for players without technical automotive knowledge while still rewarding driving skill.
12. Is a new Need for Speed game coming?
As of mid-2026, Electronic Arts has not officially confirmed a new main series Need for Speed title following Unbound (2022). The integration of Criterion Games into EA’s Battlefield development structure has created genuine uncertainty about the franchise’s near-term future. The mobile Need for Speed: Assemble developed by Tencent’s TiMi Studio continues development for the Chinese market, keeping the franchise active even during this uncertain transitional period.
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