Need for Speed: The Run originally let you get out of the car without QTEs

Need for Speed: The Run arrived at an experimental time for the 30-year-old racing franchise. A few months earlier, Shift 2: Unleashed focused on track-based motorsports.

Before that, Need for Speed: Pro Street brought sanctioned racing on closed street circuits, taking the series in a surprising direction. Need for Speed: The Run, meanwhile, took its cues from action cinema.

Released in 2011 and developed by EA Blackbox, The Run saw you play as street racer Jack Rourke, who enters a cross-country road race across America from San Francisco to New York in the hope of paying off his debt to the Mob who are after him.

Although there were no open worlds or free-roaming, The Run’s scale was bigger than any Need for Speed game before it, with over 190 miles of road.  

“We really tried to break some new ground,” but it “didn’t really work”

For the first time in the series, The Run took you out of the car. Scripted quick-time events (QTEs) saw you leave your vehicle and escape from cops and Mob bosses in frantic foot chases, as you ran through alleyways, dodged obstacles and jumped over rooftops.

These sequences required careful timing, prompting you to press buttons on the controller, but there was no freedom of control. However, this wasn’t the original plan.  

During a roundtable discussion celebrating Need for Speed’s 30th anniversary attended by Traxion, The Run’s Game Director at the time, Justin Wiebe, revealed that these on-foot sections were originally going to be far more ambitious.

 “We really tried to break some new ground there. We talked about getting out of the car. We had all these grandiose visions: it’s going to be more than just racing. Characters are going to get out of the car,” Wiebe recalled.

“But then we realised very quickly that we couldn’t really do that, so we introduced some quick-time events. We all love quick-time events, right?” he joked. Although Wiebe didn’t elaborate further, the implication is that the player could get out of their car and walk around on foot without being tied to quick-time events.

Switching to EA’s cutting-edge Frostbite 2 engine, which was introduced in Battlefield 3, enabled the team EA Blackbox to create several cinematic set pieces that looked like they belonged in a Michael Bay blockbuster. Incidentally, Bay even directed a bombastic TV advert for The Run.

One of the most memorable sequences saw you barreling down mountain roads in a BMW M3 GTS trying to outrun an avalanche. This was all part of Wiebe’s vision to create “a grand racing adventure.”   

“We wanted it to feel like your life is on the line, that it’s more humanised than ever before about the character and the story that they’re doing, racing from coast to coast,” Wiebe explained.

“I’ll be the first to stand up and say that didn’t really work,” he admitted. “But I’m proud of the fact that we tried it.”

“I thought ‘that’s a bit of a lump of coal in my resume.’”

The Run received mixed reviews, with outlets criticising its short story campaign and QTE on-foot sections. But Wieber believes it’s important to stick to a vision even if it doesn’t resonate with players. You have to give them credit for trying something new and taking a risk.

“If you try to make something for everyone, what you wind up doing is watering it down and making something for nobody in particular,” he said. “You really do have to be ruthless with your vision and say ‘we’re going to take this part of what people love about Need for Speed and we’re going to bring it to the next level’.”

“The hardest thing is to make these decisions that we know are going to be polarising for players, but that we believe is best for that product in that moment in time.”

However, The Run has since gained a cult following. “I was on a fan forum a few months ago and was shocked at how highly rated some of the fans made that game,” Wieber recalled.

“I thought ‘that’s a bit of a lump of coal in my resume.’ But it turns out that it has a massive cult following. There are certain people who absolutely adore that game. That brought a little joy to my heart that we took a risk and there are some people that found something to love about it.”

Do you have fond memories of Need for Speed The Run? Let us know in the comments below.