Porsche Unleashed

I’ve had a running joke with my wife Dorte for almost as long as we’ve been a couple. I reasoned back in the day that, since she was going to be a doctor — a more reliable source of income than writing about computer games — she should be expected to buy me the Porsche of my dreams at some point. Needless to say, I’m still waiting. I had to learn the hard way that a doctor in Denmark doesn’t earn quite as much as one in the United States. (On the other hand, a doctor here doesn’t have to work such ridiculously long hours or have to pay ridiculous insurance premiums either, so it all balances out.)

The closest my dream ever did come to fruition was not that long after we moved to Denmark, when Dorte decided to empty out much of our meager bank account to rent me a Porsche for a weekend as a birthday present. But bless her heart, she didn’t know one model from another. So, what with our finances being so stretched, she just took the cheapest one when she booked the rental online — something called a Cayenne.

This was not the Porsche of my dreams. It was a hulking SUV of the sort that… well, I won’t say that I left the United States just to escape them, but I did enjoy not being surrounded by so many of them on European roads, especially given that my standard mode of conveyance in my new life was a bicycle. Having had no idea where we were going when we climbed into a bus that morning to get to the rental place, I was more confused than disappointed as I handed over my freshly minted Danish driver’s license to the man behind the desk in order to drive away in the least interesting vehicle on the premises.

Of course, it didn’t take me that long to work out what had happened. When I did, I didn’t know whether to laugh at the best wife in the world or hug her as I observed her dismay. So, I did a little bit of both. It was like landing in an O. Henry story — but with Porsches.

In that same “Gift of the Magi” spirit, the Cayenne turned into the gift that kept on giving. We drove down to Germany that weekend to visit my in-laws, whom Dorte had informed of my big surprise beforehand. Their faces showed as much shock as hers had when they saw what we rolled up in. I then had to inform everyone, in my insufferable car-nerd way, that this Porsche was no real Porsche at all, that it was just a rebadged and gussied-up Volkswagen, with an automatic transmission, for Pete’s sake. My father-in-law thought this speech was the best part of all. He still talks regularly about the “Volksporsche” Dorte found for me.

In the end, then, we all got more pleasure out of that frumpy Cayenne than any Boxster or 911 could have given. Even Dorte has come around to admitting that the whole episode was pretty darn funny.

She hasn’t tried again; in fact, I haven’t driven another Porsche since. (In real life, that is; more on the virtual breed momentarily.) The next time Dorte led me to an undisclosed location on my birthday, it was to meet the kitten she’d picked out for me. Thankfully, unlike my Porsche, the kitten was just exactly perfect.

As the car enthusiasts among you are doubtless already raising hands to point out, the irony of my Volksporsche story is that the two brands — the one so utilitarian, the other so prestigious — have always been intimately linked. The Volkswagen Beetle was, after all, designed by a fellow named Ferdinand Porsche. And for most of the second half of the twentieth century, Porsche sports cars and that humble Volkswagen were the only mass-produced cars to sport rear-mounted, air-cooled engines. This is just one of the things that you will learn if you spend some time with Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, a rather unusual entry in Electronic Arts’s signature series of aspirational driving games.

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Porsche Unleashed is a digital love letter to the marque. No other driving game has ever been so laser-focused on a single brand; even the police cars in this game are Porsches. You could say that it all amounts to an extended corporate infomercial, and you’d be completely correct. But what an infomercial!

Like all aspirational driving games, Porsche Unleashed is a snapshot of the moment it was created. Released in March of 2000, it captured the storied sports-car maker as it charged into the new millennium with renewed purpose and optimism. Porsche had recently survived a near-death experience, and, like many a survivor of same, it had emerged determined to seize life by the throat and make up for lost time.

In 1986, Porsche had a record year, turning out 50,000 cars. In 1993, it made 14,000. Between these two data points lay a brutal sales collapse, exacerbated by a global economic downturn but primarily caused, said many, by arrogance and complacency. Hemorrhaging money, facing the very real prospect of bankruptcy, the company turned to a 38-year-old wunderkind engineer named Wendelin Wiedeking to turn things around. He remains a polarizing figure among Porsche enthusiasts to this day.

For Wiedeking utterly remade the company, turning it from an old-school maker of semi-handcrafted vehicles to an efficient, ultra-modern mass manufacturer. He went to Japan to tour the factories of Toyota, Honda, and Nissan, then returned to Porsche’s hometown of Stuttgart to implement the same processes there. In five years, he reduced the amount of time it took to make a Porsche 911 from 128 hours to 70 hours, increasing throughput in terms of cars per employee per year from 4.9 to 9.1.

More controversially, he revamped the model lineup, saying it was no longer possible to survive by making vehicles that appealed exclusively to the kind of uncompromising sports-car connoisseurs who had bought Porsches in the past — the sort of people who regarded heel-and-toe braking as an essential life skill and weren’t bothered in the least by fiddly maintenance procedures or a complete lack of luggage space. He introduced the Boxster, a mid-engine roadster that was cheaper than the flagship 911 model, more livable, and less demanding to drive and maintain. Porsche sold 16,000 of them in their debut year of 1996. For his next trick, Wiedeking gave the world a more robust and practical variant of the 911 itself, the first ever to be powered by a water-cooled engine; the anguished cries of the purists can still be heard echoing down through the years. By the turn of the millennium, Porsche’s total vehicle production had returned to its 1984 levels, with profit margins that were much higher. The financial pages were calling Porsche the automotive turnaround story of the decade, calling Wendelin Wiedeking a genius. Not content to rest on his laurels, he had moved on to his next trick: a luxury SUV called the Cayenne, based on a Volkswagen design, that was set to reach dealers in 2003. The purists (hey, that’s me!) would soon have more cause than ever to howl.

As of the year 2000, though, Porsche was still a maker of sports cars only, with a proud past, a winning present, and a bright future. It felt it had something to celebrate. And indeed, Porsche Unleashed was nothing if not a celebration.

This, then, was Porsche’s motivation. That of Electronic Arts is slightly harder to discern. Like so many other driving and sports games, the Need for Speed series has always been a bit of a black box, lacking the big public-facing personalities who place their stamp on the more design-centric genres. The decision to go in a more historical, simulation-focused direction with Porsche Unleashed is counter-intuitive on the face of it, in that this was the opposite of the direction the series had been trending over its last couple of installments — and, for that matter, the direction it would continue down as soon as this installment was done. It may be relevant to note here that Hanno Lemke, the series’s guiding light from its inception until 2007, seems to have had the least to do with this entry; he is credited here as only the executive producer rather than a line producer.

For whatever reason, Porsche Unleashed is in some ways of a piece with what came before — it’s still every inch an aspirational driving game — while being quite dramatically different in tone and feel. It is, dare I say it… classier? The only tacky part of this game is the name; Porsche Unleashed sounds more like branding for a man’s razor or a sexual supplement than a vital creative work.

I originally played it not long after its release, attracted by its Porsche-centric focus and by a stellar review from the long-defunct Games Domain, my favorite gaming website lo those many years ago. I vaguely remember loving it, but my most indelible recollection is of breaking at least three driving wheels — pulling the shift paddles right off, I believe — in my over-enthusiasm to finish first. When I picked the game up again last year, I was curious whether my jaded middle-aged self would respond to it in the same way. I didn’t buy a driving wheel, for two reasons: because it seemed incompatible with my present-day preference for playing games from the couch, and because I knew that Dorte would laugh at me as soon as I emerged from my office with such a contraption just as much as I’ve laughed at her for the Cayenne fiasco over the years. But even with a plain old Xbox controller, the magic was still there for me.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you at this point something that you may have already gathered for yourself: that Porches have always been the exception to my general disinterest in high-priced, high-powered sports cars. This may be down to their shared heritage with Volkswagen, a brand with which I was quite enamored and could actually afford in my younger days. The very first Porsche-branded car was the 356, built in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, by some reports with money looted from a factory for military vehicles which Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch, the company’s patriarchs, had set up in Stuttgart. That first 356 was little more than a Volkswagen Beetle with a different body, a stiffened-up chassis, and a souped-up engine capable of churning out all of 40 horsepower. (If that doesn’t sound like much, know that it was almost twice what you could expect from a Beetle in those early days.)

Prior to the tenure of Wendelin Wiedeking, there was a clarity of purpose — almost an austerity — about Porsches that I have always adored. They didn’t chase trends. In fact, they scarcely changed at all over whole stretches of years (which, yes, was doubtless a big reason for the morass the company had sunk into by the beginning of the 1990s.) They remained rear-engined and air-cooled long after even Volkswagen had given up on that design. To drive a car of such a design fast, you really had to know what you were doing. If you didn’t, that heavy rear end would start to come around on you, you’d hit the brakes trying to plant it down again, and in the best case you’d find yourself sitting in a roadside ditch with the hood pointing in the wrong direction entirely. Some people, myself included, found something deeply appealing about such an uncompromising vehicle. You bought a Ferrari or a Lamborghini to show off to others. You bought a Porsche for yourself. Looking back on the late 1980s — my formative years in car culture, as they were those of the modern aspirational driving game — I find that the Porsches from that time have aged a heck of a lot better than their slightly more expensive companions in games like Test Drive, even if the company wasn’t selling as many of them as it might have wished.

So, all of this is surely bound up with my appreciation for Porsche Unleashed. But I think a difference is discernible in this Need for Speed game regardless. Certainly you won’t find a sleeker and more stylish game from the turn of the millennium, a time when tastes in gaming aesthetics in general were often still those of nerdy adolescents. Although it was made in Canada, the feel of the game is more European than North American, which is only appropriate given the subject matter. The chilly house beats that play behind the proceedings are a perfect match for the airbrushed discotheque-ready sheen of the rest of the production.

Another thing you’ll notice before you actually set yourself behind the wheel are the gallery of photographs and press clipping awaiting your perusal, now or later. Although I’ve never been to Porsche’s official museum in Stuttgart, I can imagine that its mood might be a lot like this, at least if they’re doing it right.

But of course, none of this would matter at all if the cars weren’t fun to drive. Happily, then, fun they are. Really, really fun. Porsche Unleashed lands in exactly the right sweet spot between an obviously artificial arcade game like the old Outrun and a fiddly, rigorous simulator like the NASCAR games from Papyrus Design. It is, in other words, an aesthetic simulation par excellence; it feels like you’re actually driving one of these cool cars. The 911s are the highlight of the experience, as they by all rights ought to be. You have to learn that, when that infamously squirrelly rear end comes around on you, you can’t follow your natural instinct to hit the brakes, for that way lies a disastrous spin. No, you have to step on the gas, which will transfer the car’s weight to the rear and let those loosy-goosy tires grip the road again. When you figure out that you can throw your car into the curves, let the back end drift around deliberately, and then down-shift and clomp down on the accelerator to power out of them, it’s an awesome, well-nigh revelatory moment. I’m not sure that I can recall a more satisfying feeling in all my decades of playing videogames. Spend some time with this game, and you will begin to understand why people love those vintage 911s so much.

All of the courses you can drive are located in Europe. They include the streets of Monte Carlo, the German Autobahn, and a rather generic industrial zone that could be found on any of six continents. But most of them put you on twisting smaller roads, mostly in France. While this is in some ways an odd choice for a game about a legendary German automaker, the end result is so lovely that I’ll let it pass without further comment.

These courses are all a blast to drive and explore, with plenty of the shortcuts and hidden byways that virtual motorists love. They looked spectacular in the year 2000, and still stand up surprisingly well today; this game is almost as effective an advertisement for France as it is for Porsche. It seems weird to use the word “bucolic” in reference to a franchise called Need for Speed, but for this installment it really is applicable. I sometimes like to take an old, slow 356 out just to practice my line through the courses and enjoy the scenery. Call it a reminder of what driving a sports car used to mean: driving well, and having a great time doing it, even if you weren’t going all that fast in absolute terms.

Just one year after Need for Speed: High Stakes introduced a longer-term meta-game to the franchise, Porsche Unleashed gave you two of them, both equally well-done. Its direct equivalent to the High Stakes career mode is called Evolution. Just like in the previous game, you start out with a single modest car and an equally modest sum of cash, with the dictate to go forth and win races to improve the state of your garage and your bank account. But Porsche Unleashed adds a larger historical chronology to the proceedings. As you open up new races to enter, you also advance through time from your starting point in 1950, when the only car you can buy is a Porsche 356 that sways and rolls more than a fat man on a bender and is powered by what sounds and performs like a lawn-mower engine.

In addition to its other attractions, the Evolution mode is another fine history lesson, this time an interactive, hands-on one. When the 911 comes onto the stage in 1964, well after the 356 has overcome its humble origins to get pretty darn good, you might feel like many a 356 aficionado did at the time: skeptical of the newcomer, to put it mildly. But rest assured that the 911, an automotive icon for a reason, will win you over quickly enough.

To its credit, the Evolution mode includes lots of Porsches that aren’t the 356s and 911s around which the brand built its reputation. The 914 is here — this being the semi-infamous Volksporsche which combined a Porsche chassis with the exact same motor that powered the Volkswagen bus I owned all those years ago. (I kid you not.) And we can have a go with the 944, a later lower-end sports car, and the 928, the grand tourer that Porsche made twenty years before the Cayenne was a gleam in Wendelin Wiedeking’s eye. None of these cars is as fun to drive as the fishy-tailed 911, but it’s great to see them nonetheless. Ditto the real oddballs, such as the Porsche 550 Spyder, which looks like an overturned bathtub and is a terrifying handful on the road, such that you can understand all too well how the actor James Dean could have met his death in one in 1955. All told, playing through the entirety of the Evolution mode, from that first 356 to the Y2K incarnations of the Boxster and 911, is quite a trip. A course that used to take you six or seven minutes to traverse will be done in barely two by the time you’ve finished assembling your garage full of Porsches. Evolution indeed!

The other meta-game here is a dramatic new innovation for the series. The Factory Driver mode is a sign of the changing times in gaming circa 2000, when more and more genres were finding ways to include set-piece story lines. The story here isn’t a particularly good one in the abstract, mind you, but it’s notable for existing at all. More importantly, it’s at least as entertaining as the Evolution mode in practice.

You’ve come to Porsche to work as a test driver. Over 34 assignments, you have to prove your mettle and fend off various challengers from among your colleagues. Some assignments take place on a slalom course right there in the factory parking lot, but most repurpose the same roadways that you race on in Evolution mode. Realism is not a priority; I certainly hope that the real Porsche doesn’t deliver its cars to the port for shipment by racing them at breakneck speeds over public thoroughfares. Some of the assignments are really hard, at least for a middle-aged man like me; it took me more than an hour of trying to complete an embarrassing number of them. But boy, are they fun, and boy, is it satisfying when you win a race against the clock that had seemed impossible at the outset.

In fact, I think that I adore this part of the game even more than the rest of it; I don’t even mind that you’re mostly driving 1990s-vintage Porsches in Factory Driver mode, with only the occasional blast from the past. This mode is actually an excellent place to start with the game, as it will teach you skills that will serve you well when you move on to Evolution mode. The only drawback to this ordering is that, if you’re at all like me, you may find that Evolution mode, good as it is, pales just slightly in comparison.

As has surely become all too clear by now, I have very little bad to say about this game. Normally, when I’m writing about a game, I try to temper my criticisms by reminding myself that there is someone out there who likes it a lot more than I do, who cares about it more than I do. Well, that may not be the case with Porsche Unleashed. Even grizzled, jaded critics like me have those special games that stick in our craw for reasons that we may not be entirely able to articulate. Porsche Unleashed is one of those games for me. It seems that all I can bring myself to do is gush over it.

Yes, it’s easy enough to call it too slick by half, to call it corporate propaganda. But it’s just so well-done, so aesthetically masterful and so carefully calibrated for the maximum enjoyment of yours truly, that I don’t care. Part of me feels bad that I haven’t found any other driving games to fall in love with in the same way as this one. Another part of me — the bigger part, I think — feels that, when a driving game is as good as this one, what’s the point of having any others?

Despite reviews that tended to be almost as gushing as the one I’ve just written, Porsche Unleashed was less commercially successful than its predecessors in the Need for Speed series. That disappointment prompted a franchise course correction — or rather re-correction, back to the direction the series had been trending before this detour into a single marque’s history. I feel like I ought to write that this was a shame, but, honestly, what would more games in this spirit have looked like? Ferrari Unleashed? Lamborghini Unleashed? I suppose you could try, but somehow it wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe that’s just the Porsche lover in me talking once again.

As it was, the Need for Speed series soared to new commercial heights early in the aughts by capitalizing on the craze among the youth for “tuning” and (illegally) racing more ordinary and accessible cars, as celebrated by the 2001 cinematic blockbuster The Fast and the Furious and its sequels. For many post-millennial driving-game fans, Porsche Unleashed remained relevant primarily for the sixteen-year (!) exclusive license Porsche had granted to Electronic Arts; this meant that their cars could not appear in anyone else’s games, even as EA’s own were now favoring Hondas and Nissans and even Volkswagens over Porsches and Ferraris and Lamborghinis. When the long moratorium finally ended in 2016, it was front-page news on many a gaming website. (Would we have gotten more exclusively Porsche Need for Speed games if the first one had been more successful? It’s tempting to wonder — but, again, what else could those games have done that the first one didn’t?)

Today, the expired status of the same license agreement means that Porsche Unleashed is not available for purchase anywhere. But you can still find it in the musty back hallways of the Internet, including at a certain archiving organization. It can be tricky to get running well on modern hardware, but it’s not impossible. A good place to start is with the “Combined Patch” by Tsalikon. Just make sure to play the Windows rather than the Playstation version; the latter is so dramatically stripped down as to be for all practical purposes a different, inferior game altogether.

Naturally, you will have to decide for yourself whether it’s worth the effort to track down the game and get it running. I can only say that it was most emphatically worth it for me to renew my relationship with this old flame. I am, it seems, a driving-game monogamist. What I lack in my breadth of appreciation for them is made up for by the depth of my attachment to this one.

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Sources: I drew my brief summation of Porsche’s recent history and situation circa 2000 from a Harvard Business School case study by Jeffrey Fear and Carin-Isabel Knoop. And let me recommend the book The Nazi Billionaires by David de Jong to anyone who wants to explore the darker side of Volkswagen and Porsche’s origins, the stuff you will never see in a slick propaganda piece like this one.