Did you know that Need For Speed: Shift wasn’t always called Need For Speed: Shift? No? Well you do now. Instead, EA had initially planned to roll it out as a sequel to Need For Speed: ProStreet.
Shift’s Lead Designer, Andy Tudor explains:
“Yeah. It [Shift] actually started out as ProStreet 2.
“You’ll see the obvious references, like we’ve got the Tokyo track in there, albeit a bit more mature; there’s no balloons or anything like that. The thing with ProStreet was that they couldn’t go straight from street racing to a track racer – that would have annoyed a few people. So it was really the first stage of the transition, mixing courses with the street stuff, and this is where they [EA] always wanted it to go.”
We dare say the association with the ProStreet name wouldn’t have exactly been a big crowdpleaser either, Andy.
Check out the full article on the GamerZines website where Andy talks about EA’s suggestion that cop cars and nitrous should be included in Shift. Hint: he wasn’t a fan.

Can’t believe that it was developed as prostreet 2. That was a real torture for a game lover but yes loved shift because of its better graphics.
nice review, loved to play this game
hi together,
saw this game at my brothers pc, checked it out.
it is the most ridiclilous console import i saw in my whole life. i’m running an 8 core machine 8 gigs of ram in quad chan mode crossfired 3870’s. loading times are like amiga 500. i still got low fps (like 10 fps) after 2 hours of fixing and patching. i hope none of you spended money on this piece of crap. or you are running nvidia cards.
cheers to ea for catching a lot of morons.
i’m out
Even though Shift didn’t end up with Pro Street 2, it did good with Need for Speed.