One of the weird realization for me as I learnt English and listened to authors who contributed to these games, is that many remastered their tracks to exclude swear words and obvious mentions of drugs, or was it EA specialists? NFS Underground and Most Wanted games were filled with rap and metal, but still got rated for teens because of that. When I've heard some of these songs in their album versions for the first time and there were actual lines or even paragraphs I've not heard before it was very weird. I applaud whoever did this and still kept these songs bangers as they are, intact, hard hitting whenever you hard them back then or now like I do.
That was probably never talked about, but here it is: someone did a very good job. You'd probably never notice that until you hear the original.
If you happen to not believe me, check the first verse from Dilated People's Who is Who. That's the worst edit of the bunch, although it's one of my favorite tracks in the game. This flow is fucking tight, DPs are Erik B and Rakim for millenials, fight me. Either way, here are these tracks:
Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndEvdwIPTU4
Choppy NFSU version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om0PvVJjkgY
That didn't occured to me in the early 00s, but you can hear the MC cut being half-word in. I'm puzzled how it got into production if it wasn't a fuck you from the artists leaving a clue about the whole text, kek.
I don't know why I dumped that on you, but now you know there are specially created versions of songs for some old games that wanted to sound all gangsta but still keep themselves teen-friendly. You are welcome.
NFS Hot Pursuit 2 has some tracks from Hot Action Cop that has basically unintelligible lyrics. Listening to the originals, they’re raunchy as hell. One of them was even used as intro music.