You can play this, right now.

Need for Speed GT is the second version of GlobalVR's arcade conversion of EA Seattle's Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. Released in 2004, this upgrade to 2003's Need for Speed (arcade) added more cars, updated handling, and new, fancier UI and HUD elements.

There's history and and such below the fold, but if you just want to play NFS GT yourself, you can check out the writeup I put together.

If you'd like to contribute, consider joining the NFS Arcade Discord server I've just created.

NFS GT was an interesting game and featured significantly different car handling when compared to its home counterpart.

However, GlobalVR would soon release a conversion of Need for Speed Underground, including an upgrade kit to turn NFS and NFS GT arcade machines into Underground ones.

They repeated this process in 2008 with Need for Speed Carbon. Both games had much higher earning potential, thanks to their save systems, career modes, and trendier themes.

Very few NFS GT cabinets have survived to the modern day, having either been upgraded into Underground/Carbon or thrown away/converted into other games due to the aging, unreliable, proprietary hardware GlobalVR stuffed in these machines.

However, thanks to the work of a modder known as konigsseg, we can now play Need for Speed and Need for Speed GT on modern Windows computers.

The instructions included with konigsseg's release got me started but did not answer every question, so I've spent roughly a week troubleshooting and documenting issues.

Much of that time was spent trying (and failing) to remap controls. The game is reading controls from some invisible config and I've not been able to locate it or get it to read anything else.

Since the game is playable with the default keyboard controls, and even gamepads (albeit with a weird config) I've decided to go ahead with releasing the tutorial and see if I can't crowdsource a solution.

WE FIGURED IT OUT. YOU CAN REMAP CONTROLS NOW.

I'll have a video up on YouTube later this week discussing the game and this tutorial.

Happy playing!