Get The Drive’s daily newsletter The latest car news, reviews, and features. Email address Sign Up Thank you! Terms of Service & Privacy Policy.
Speedhunters, as we know it, is done for. The car photography site that shaped a generation’s automotive imagination went out with a whimper, not a bang, when publishing quietly froze in April. After I reported the news last week, past contributors flooded my inbox with notes as they sought to share their side of the story. Now that I’ve sat down with them for hours, talking over the phone and email while reaching out to other key figures in the Speedhunters saga, I’m publishing all my findings here.
One thing I want to make clear straight away is that this isn’t the comprehensive follow-up I hoped to write. Several high-ranking staffers failed to respond to my request for comment, and Electronic Arts—Speedhunters’ parent company—didn’t have anything to say, either. Still, I gained a ton of insight from five contributors who were willing to speak with me, four of whom asked to remain anonymous, citing professional and legal concerns. What’s important is they worked at the site during its heyday and managed to stick around until the bitter, uneventful end.
The story is tragic, but it can be summed up in one line: Speedhunters was never supposed to be so big in the first place.
Why Speedhunters Was Founded
Here’s an incredibly early version of the Speedhunters site, archived on the Wayback Machine with a date of May 17, 2008. Internet Archive
Speedhunters was founded by Rod Chong in 2008 with backing from EA, the video game company that still owns the site now. It was created to connect EA with automotive culture, helping inform the content choices for its Need for Speed titles. In short, Speedhunters tied the games to the real world while building credibility among actual car people.
The site’s involvement with NFS was far deeper than most outsiders realized, as several contributors told me. They would attend massive events—think SEMA and Tokyo Auto Salon, but also the Nürburgring 24 Hours—then report back to the game’s creators. One former Speedhunters contributor told me the access they had was “unreal,” so much so that getting press credentials for virtually any car event in the world was a given.
Boots-on-the-ground content capture then made its way into games like NFS: Shift, with early Speedhunters blogs featuring screengrabs and clips from the motorsport-focused title. This continued for more than a decade, across multiple NFS entries.
Peep the Speedhunters windshield decal on this drifting Subaru BRZ from 2015’s Need for Speed reboot. Electronic Arts
... continue reading