Ghost Games was Electronic Arts' Gothenburg studio and, for most of the 2010s, the sole custodian of the Need for Speed series. EA opened the Swedish operation in 2011 as EA Gothenburg, seeding it with staff drawn from the publisher's existing racing talent and from a satellite office in Guildford that traded as Ghost Games UK, and the combined operation took the Ghost Games name in 2013. Marcus Nilsson led it as executive producer through its most productive years. The studio's remit was unusually narrow for an EA outfit of its size: one franchise, handed over from Criterion Games, which had steered Need for Speed through Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted and was moving on to other work.
Need for Speed Rivals arrived in 2013 as a co-production with Criterion and established the pattern that followed - the Frostbite engine, an always-connected open world, and a deliberate pull back toward the street racing culture the series grew out of. The 2015 reboot, simply titled Need for Speed, went furthest in that direction, building a permanently nocturnal Ventura Bay around live action characters and real car builders, and splitting progression across five separate reputations rather than one leaderboard. Need for Speed Payback followed in 2017 with a heist-driven campaign, and Need for Speed Heat in 2019 with a day and night cycle that separated sanctioned racing from illegal street events. Ghost Games UK had already closed in 2015, and in February 2020 EA moved Need for Speed development back to Criterion and refocused the Gothenburg studio on engineering support, reverting it to the EA Gothenburg name. What survives is a four-game run that pushed the series toward car culture rather than pure arcade spectacle, and a 2015 reboot that players still return to for the way it looks and sounds at night.
