This Guy Made Need For Speed Underground’s Wild Gauges A Reality

It pains me to say this, because it means that I’m getting old, but the street-racing game Need For Speed Underground 2 is 21 years old. It’s old enough to drink in the US. It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago that I was tearing through the city of Bayview in neon-clad, nitrous-injected sport compacts. That game, and its predecessors and successors, definitely fueled my dreams of building up my own tuned cars. My own Mazda Miata has some mild body modifications, aftermarket wheels, and it’s supercharged. Though I’ve skipped the underglow, at least for the time being. I’m far from the only person inspired by the games, though. Another person is Andy Valentine of the YouTube channel Garage Tinkering. He went above and beyond to bring the game to reality with custom graphics for his instrument screens that match those in the game.

You Can Practically Hear “Riders On The Storm” Playing

Before we dig into Valentine’s creation, let’s quickly go over the significance of these gauges. Underground 2 had some of the most in-depth car customization of any video game before or after. In addition to performance parts, body kits, and custom paint schemes, players could even add custom stereo equipment and change the gauge graphics on the head-up display. It was all in an effort to emulate what people were doing in real life, with the latter reflecting the custom faceplates and backlight colors available for some cars. Underground 2 also featured gauge designs from mild to silly. As Valentine highlights in his first video on the project, there was one that looked like it was made of gold with diamonds for the rpm markers, and one with a cute, vaguely anime-style cat.

It’s the cat design that brings us to Valentine and his gauges. In addition to customizing his own Nissan 350Z, which he explains he got in part because of his time with Underground 2, he has been doing a lot of tinkering with creating custom digital gauges, working with the hardware, screens, and graphics. He even sells some of this hardware on his website so that you can create some custom gauges, too. At some point, he got the idea to recreate one of the layouts from the game, and he landed on the cat design, which is called “Tabby” in the game. Being an old game with low-resolution head-up display assets, though, he couldn’t just find the assets in the game files and load them into his digital gauges. Instead, he blew up a large image of the gauges and recreated each piece of the design in Adobe Illustrator. The results were practically perfect replicas of the game design, but now in crispy high-resolution and fully functional with a tachometer and speedometer. He even adjusted the nitrous bar gauge to be a throttle position indicator so that it would have some use in his car. He didn’t stop at the main cat design, either, as he also created the auxiliary gauge design that featured a paw print to put on his smaller screens.

He’s Not Done Yet

As shown in the video above, Valentine is still tinkering with the gauges. He made some adjustments so that individual parts of the gauges can have their colors changed, just like in the game. He also adjusted the controls and text for the gauge interface to reflect the game, too. So when you go to change the colors, the font is green and italicized, and the touch buttons are pale gray circles, just like in the menus of Underground 2. Having poured so many hours into this game, and stared at the same menus and interfaces, I can say for sure that he nailed the look, and I sincerely appreciate the attention to detail. Finally, Valentine said in the video that, since the project has been well-received, he may do more designs. Once he’s satisfied with the designs and layouts, he will make them available, and they will be compatible with the same boards and screens that he has used.