Surprised by the fact that Forza Horizon is now the only widely successful racing game, a reader tries to explain why the genre has fallen out of fashion. Before I started writing this, I had no idea the Need For Speed franchise was 32 years old. That’s what Wikipedia says, but I’m not going to pretend I played the original in 1994. The first one that I definitely remember playing was Need for Speed: Underground in 2003 on the PlayStation 2. At that point they were knocking out yearly sequels, and it was one of the biggest franchises around. All my friends played them and it was one of the biggest things around for casual gamers in particular. It’s pretty obvious why: who doesn’t fantasise about driving fast cars, without having to actually be all that good at driving. That’s the appeal of arcade racers and back in the 2000s it made total sense that Need For Speed, and things like Burnout, would be some of the biggest games around. But then those sort of games slowly started to disappear, replaced by boring sims like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport, until things got so bad that Need For Speed doesn’t exist anymore. I never understood why you couldn’t have both arcade and driving sims at the same time but for years Gran Turismo and its sort were dominant… until they went away as well. It’s hard to tell how much that’s to plan, given how long Gran Turismo games take to make usually, but Forza Motorsport definitely isn’t coming back, because Microsoft has laid off most of the developers. But now we’re in a situation where both arcade and serious racing games aren’t being made. They do still exist, but they’re much more niche than the used to be, and