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The Golden Age of Illegal Street Racing Games
Posted on November 15, 2025
Need for Speed: Most Wanted wasn't just a game. It was a moment.
You know the one I'm talking about. That intro where you're racing the BMW M3 GTR through the streets at dawn, Styles of Beyond blasting, before Razor cheats you out of your car. The pure, concentrated early-2000s energy of it all. The game didn't just let you race — it made you feel something.
And Most Wanted wasn't alone. Between 2003 and 2008, we lived through the absolute golden age of illegal street racing games. NFS Underground, Midnight Club 3, Burnout 3, Juiced — these weren't just racing games. They were cultural artifacts. They captured a specific moment when car culture, hip-hop, and video games collided in the most beautiful, ridiculous way possible.
And we'll never get that back.
️ When Racing Games Had Soul
Here's what made 2000s street racing games special: they had personality.
Underground 2 let you customize everything. And I mean everything. You could spend hours in the garage tweaking your Nissan Skyline's underglow, adding vinyls, adjusting the cant on your wheels. The game respected car culture. It understood that for a lot of people, the car itself was the point — racing was just an excuse to show it off.
Most Wanted had that Blacklist system where you worked your way up through 15 rivals, each with their own personality, car, and territory. You knew who Razor was. You hated him. When you finally beat him and got your M3 back, it meant something. Modern racing games give you a championship trophy. Most Wanted gave you revenge.
Carbon had the canyon duels, the crew system, territory wars. Underground had those amazing magazine covers when you won events. These games understood drama, progression, and making you feel like you were part of something bigger than just "Race 1, Race 2, Race 3."
The Soundtracks That Defined an Era
Let's be honest: half the reason we remember these games is the music.
Underground introduced an entire generation to rock-rap fusion with Lil Jon, The Crystal Method, and Static-X. Most Wanted had Styles of Beyond's "Nine Thou" — which is still THE illegal street racing anthem. Carbon brought in Shortcuts, Nahkti, and a darker, more aggressive vibe.
These soundtracks didn't just accompany the game; they defined it. You can't think about Underground 2 without hearing "Riders on the Storm" by Snoop Dogg. You can't think about Burnout 3 without remembering how perfectly the soundtrack synced with causing massive highway pileups.
Modern racing games have licensed music too, but it's curated to be safe, broad, inoffensive. The 2000s games took risks. They had a point of view. They said "this is what street racing sounds like" and committed to it.
️ Arcade Fun vs. Simulation Snobbery
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: arcade physics are more fun.
I know, I know. Gran Turismo and Forza fans will come for me. "But realistic tire wear!" "But proper weight transfer!" Look, I respect simulation racing. I do. But there's something magical about the way an NFS game lets you drift around a corner at 140 mph, scrape three cop cars, hit a speedbreaker, and land perfectly to continue the race.
The 2000s street racers understood that realism isn't the same as fun. They gave you just enough vehicle weight and handling to feel good, then threw realism out the window in favor of spectacle. Burnout let you ram opponents into walls at 200 mph and walk away. Midnight Club let you activate special abilities mid-race. These games weren't simulating reality — they were simulating the fantasy of illegal street racing.
And that's what made them great.
Peak Fast & Furious Energy
These games didn't exist in a vacuum. They were part of the early Fast & Furious cultural moment.
The first F&F came out in 2001. 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003. Tokyo Drift in 2006. And right in that window, we got Underground (2003), Underground 2 (2004), and Most Wanted (2005). The games and movies were feeding off each other, creating this feedback loop of import car culture, street racing aesthetics, and impossibly cool underground racing scenes.
The games captured something the movies eventually lost: that scrappy, underground energy. Before the series became about stealing god's eye satellites and driving cars into space, it was about quarter-mile races for pink slips. The games stayed in that pocket longer.
NFS Underground's entire aesthetic — the neon underglow, the vinyl wraps, the body kits, the hydraulics — was pure early F&F. And it worked because the culture was real. People really did modify Civics and Eclipses like that. The games weren't inventing a fantasy; they were celebrating a subculture.
What Modern Racing Games Lost
So what happened? Why don't we get games like this anymore?
Part of it is that racing games split into two camps: ultra-realistic sims (Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport) and over-the-top arcade chaos (Mario Kart, Rocket League). The middle ground — arcade-style street racers with personality — basically disappeared.
The 2015 Need for Speed reboot tried to recapture the magic and... didn't. It had the customization, it had the aesthetic, but it felt hollow. Always-online requirement. Cringeworthy live-action cutscenes. The soul was gone.
NFS Heat (2019) got closer, but it still felt safe. Corporate. The edges were sanded off. No more edgy soundtracks. No more genuinely antagonistic rivals you wanted to destroy. Just clean, acceptable, algorithm-friendly racing.
And split-screen? Forget it. The 2000s were the last era where you and three friends could crowd around one TV with four controllers and race together. Now everything's online, matchmaking, anonymous opponents you'll never see again. We traded couch co-op for convenience and lost something irreplaceable.
The Moments We'll Never Forget
Some memories are burned into my brain:
That first time you saw your customized car on a magazine cover in Underground. The game literally put your creation on the in-game equivalent of Import Tuner and made you feel like a star.
The Pursuit Breaker moments in Most Wanted. Smashing through a gas station to drop a canopy on the cops behind you. Chef's kiss.
The canyon duels in Carbon. One mistake and you're off the cliff. Pure adrenaline.
Causing a massive pile-up in Burnout 3's Crash mode. Watching the damage counter climb into the millions as cars explode in slow motion.
The Midnight Club 3 open world. Cruising through San Diego or Atlanta with your crew, challenging random racers, finding shortcuts.
These weren't just gameplay mechanics. They were experiences. They made you feel something.
Why It Mattered
I think what I miss most about 2000s racing games is the creativity.
Developers were willing to take risks. They'd try weird stuff. Juiced had betting systems and crew members you could recruit. Midnight Club had that crazy "find your own route" open-world approach. NFS Carbon had autosculpt for designing custom body kits. These features didn't always work perfectly, but they tried something new.
Modern racing games feel like they're following a template. Here's your car list. Here's your track list. Here's your online multiplayer. Nothing too weird. Nothing too specific. Nothing that might alienate a potential market segment.
The 2000s street racers knew exactly who they were for: people who wanted to feel like underground racing legends, people who loved car culture, people who wanted drama and personality and style along with their racing. They weren't trying to be everything to everyone.
And maybe that's the real lesson. When you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. The 2000s racing games were unapologetically themselves. They were cheesy, over-the-top, sometimes ridiculous — and that's exactly why we still remember them.
Of course, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I've spent 2000 words gushing about these games, but let me be real with you: the 2000s weren't actually as great as I'm making them sound. More on that next time.
What's your favorite racing game from the 2000s? Sign the guestbook and tell me which game defined street racing for you.
Why I Don't Want My Website to Be 'Discoverable'
Posted on November 12, 2025
A friend asked me recently: "Why haven't you optimized your site for SEO? Don't you want people to find it?"
And I realized something that probably sounds crazy in 2025: No. Not really.
I don't want this site to be "discoverable" in the way we usually mean it. I don't want it ranking on Google. I don't want it going viral. I don't want thousands of strangers stumbling upon it because an algorithm decided it would maximize their engagement.
Let me explain why that's actually a good thing.
The Tyranny of Discoverability
Somewhere along the way, we decided that if content isn't easily discoverable, it's worthless. If your blog doesn't rank on page one of Google, why bother writing it? If your video doesn't hit the algorithm just right, did it even happen?
This mindset has ruined the internet.
It means every piece of writing is reverse-engineered for search engines. Every video title is clickbait. Every blog post is stuffed with keywords. We're not creating for humans anymore — we're creating for robots that decide what humans see.
And worse: it makes us write for everyone instead of someone.
Small Spaces Are Better Spaces
Think about your favorite online communities. I bet they weren't the biggest ones.
The best forum I ever joined had maybe 200 active members. We all knew each other's usernames. Inside jokes developed. When someone disappeared for a while, people noticed and asked if they were okay.
That forum never showed up on Google. You found it through a link from another small site, or because a friend told you about it. That barrier to entry — that tiny bit of effort required to find it — filtered for people who actually cared.
The huge subreddits with millions of subscribers? They're different. Louder, faster, more anonymous. Not necessarily worse, but definitely not intimate.
When you optimize for discoverability, you're optimizing for scale. And scale is the enemy of community.
The Joy of Being Hard to Find
When someone finds this site, I want it to feel like discovering something.
Maybe they clicked through from another personal site's links page. Maybe a friend sent them the URL directly. Maybe they were browsing Neocities and stumbled across it by chance.
However they got here, they meant to be here. They took an intentional step. And that changes everything.
When someone signs my guestbook, I know they actually read the site. They're not just drive-by traffic from a Google search for "cool retro websites." They found their way here through the old paths — links, recommendations, exploration.
Those people are my audience. All twelve of them.
Against Growth for Growth's Sake
Here's a question nobody asks anymore: Why do you want more visitors?
For a business, the answer is obvious: more visitors means more customers means more money. But this isn't a business. It's a personal website. What am I selling? Who benefits from getting to 10,000 monthly visitors instead of 100?
Not me. More traffic just means more maintenance, more spam in the guestbook, more people demanding updates or changes. The people who find this site organically are already the right audience.
We've internalized the Silicon Valley growth mindset so deeply that we can't imagine creating something that isn't supposed to scale. But think about it: your dinner party doesn't need to "grow its userbase." Your journal doesn't need "engagement metrics." Your garden doesn't need to "optimize for reach."
Some things are allowed to be small.
Privacy Through Obscurity
There's also something freeing about not being findable.
I can write whatever I want here without worrying about it showing up when someone googles my name. I can experiment with weird ideas. I can be myself without performing for an imaginary mass audience.
This isn't hiding — the site is public, anyone with the URL can visit. It's just choosing not to broadcast. It's the difference between having a conversation in your living room versus shouting in a public square.
The old web understood this. You could have a whole website dedicated to your niche hobby or weird interest, and it would just... exist. Quietly. For the people who cared enough to find it.
How to Be Intentionally Undiscoverable
If you're inspired to make your own small corner of the web, here's how to keep it cozy:
Skip the SEO. Don't worry about keywords, meta descriptions, or sitemaps. Write for humans, not search engines.
Don't share it on social media. Or do, but sparingly. Let it spread organically through links and word of mouth.
Embrace the link economy. Put your site on a links page. Join a webring. Get listed in small directories. These are low-traffic ways to be found by the right people.
Use robots.txt if you want. You can literally tell search engines not to index your site. Not every page needs to be in Google.
Forget analytics. Do you really need to know your bounce rate? Just make stuff and let it exist.
The Web We Need
I think the internet would be better if more sites were like this. Small, weird, personal, hard to find unless you're actually looking.
Not because discoverability is bad — sometimes you need to be found. Businesses, public services, important information should absolutely be easy to discover.
But personal websites? Hobby blogs? Fan shrines? Creative projects? Maybe those can just... exist. Not everything needs to compete for attention.
This site has Comic Sans and rainbow text and a guestbook nobody's signed yet. It loads in under a second. It costs me $0 to host on Neocities. It will never make money, never go viral, never be featured anywhere.
And that's exactly why I love it.
If you found your way here, welcome. You were meant to be here. Not because an algorithm sent you, but because you followed a link, or a recommendation, or curiosity. You're not traffic. You're a guest.
And that makes all the difference.
How did you find this site? I'm genuinely curious. Sign the guestbook and let me know your journey here — every path is interesting.
Why the Old Web Was Better (And What We Lost)
Posted on November 9, 2025
Remember when the internet felt like exploring someone's bedroom instead of walking through a mall?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately while building this site. Every time I add another blinking GIF or pick a garish color combination that would make a modern designer weep, I realize something: the old web wasn't just different aesthetically — it was different philosophically.
The Web of Bedrooms
In the early 2000s, personal websites were exactly that — personal. Your GeoCities page was like inviting someone into your room. It was messy, chaotic, and completely, unapologetically you. You had your favorite anime characters in the header, a MIDI file of your favorite song playing on loop, and a page dedicated to your hamster named Mr. Whiskers.
Nobody cared if your color scheme was "on brand." There was no brand. There was just you, HTML tables, and whatever GIF animations you could find on animation websites.
Today's web feels more like a endless corporate park. Every site looks the same: minimal white space, the same three fonts, perfectly centered hero images with overlay text. Instagram profiles. LinkedIn pages. Medium blogs with that signature font. We've optimized the soul right out of it.
Discovery vs. Algorithm
Back then, you found websites through webrings — circular chains of sites about similar topics. You'd click "next site" and stumble onto someone's shrine to their favorite TV show, complete with fan fiction and a chat room.
Or you'd browse directories. Or follow a link from a friend's site. Every click was a small adventure. You never knew if the next page would be brilliantly weird or just... weird weird. But that was the charm.
Now? The algorithm decides what you see. Facebook shows you content designed to maximize engagement (read: outrage). Google surfaces SEO-optimized content farms. TikTok feeds you what keeps you scrolling. We've traded serendipity for efficiency, and lost something magical in the process.
Creation vs. Consumption
Here's the big one: the old web assumed you were a creator.
If you wanted to be online, you built something. Maybe it was just a page with your favorite quotes and a guestbook, but you made it. You learned HTML by viewing source on other people's pages. You taught yourself CSS by breaking things and fixing them. Everyone was a builder.
Modern social media turned us into consumers. Sure, you can "post content," but within their walled gardens, using their templates, playing by their rules. Try to customize your Facebook page — you can't. Want to change your Twitter layout? Nope. You're not a creator anymore; you're a tenant.
And worse: we stopped owning our content. Your tweets, your photos, your memories — they live on someone else's server. If the company goes under or decides to delete your account, poof. Gone.
Community vs. Audience
Old web forums and guestbooks fostered real communities. You'd recognize the same usernames. Inside jokes developed. People with niche interests — model train enthusiasts, obscure anime fans, amateur astronomers — found each other and built genuine connections.
Now we have "followers" and "engagement metrics." Conversations happen in the replies, but they're performative. You're not talking to people; you're talking to an audience. Everything is a take, a hot take, a content opportunity.
The old web was about connection. The new web is about attention.
What We Can Bring Back
I'm not suggesting we all abandon modern platforms (I'm on Bluesky — see the footer!). But we can reclaim some of what made the old web special:
Build your own corner of the internet. Get a domain. Learn basic HTML. Make something that's yours — truly yours. Let it be weird. Let it be ugly. Let it have eighteen different fonts and a tiled background of stars.
Link to other people's sites. Bring back the blogroll. Make a links page. Help people discover things the algorithm would never show them.
Make things for the joy of making. Not everything needs to be monetized or optimized. Sometimes a website about your cat is enough.
Own your content. Cross-post to social media if you want, but keep the original on your own site. Your digital home should be yours.
Final Thoughts
The internet used to be a place we built together, one garish personal homepage at a time. Somewhere along the way, we let corporations build it for us instead. We traded creativity for convenience, communities for audiences, bedrooms for billboards.
But here's the thing: that old web never really died. It's still here, in the corners. On Neocities. On personal blogs. On weird little sites maintained by people who remember what the internet could be.
This site — with its Comic Sans and rainbow text and complete disregard for modern design principles — isn't just nostalgia. It's a reminder that the web can still be a place for creativity, weirdness, and genuine self-expression.
It's a rebellion against the algorithm.
And honestly? It's way more fun.
What do you remember about the old web? Do you miss it? Sign the guestbook and let me know — I read every entry.
How I made this website
Posted on November 6, 2025
This site started as a small retro web experiment — I wanted a page that blends the feel of the 2000s GeoCities era with a few modern conveniences.
What I used:
- Plain HTML for structure (index, about, links, guestbook, blog, 404).
- CSS for the visual style and animations (gradients, striped "under construction" banner, and a rainbow text animation).
- Lightweight assets only — I replaced external PNG/GIF icons with emoji and CSS patterns to keep the site small and easy to host on Neocities.
Design notes:
- I used a playful font (Comic Sans) and bright gradients to evoke early personal homepages.
- Navigation is simple and repeated on every page so visitors always know where they are.
- Small features like a guestbook, site counter, and "Now Playing" area are there for nostalgia and to make the site feel alive.
Features added so far: a Games section, a Blog, a custom 404 page, and a Bluesky link in the footer. I deliberately avoided heavy libraries to keep this portable and easy to upload to Neocities.
If you want, I can split this into a longer standalone post (with screenshots or an expanded developers' notes page), add a thumbnail for a game, or wire the guestbook to a backend.
Continue reading →