How Forza raced past the competition to become gaming's biggest driving series

Using key personnel from the publishing arm responsible for the Xbox’s racing and sports games, Microsoft formed Turn 10, a development studio founded with the goal of creating the next great racing simulator and showing off the Xbox’s technological prowess. The pitch was Forza Motorsport.

“From a business perspective it was supposed to be the Gran Turismo answer on the Xbox,” says Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10 and the face of Forza. “But that’s not what inspired us creatively, it was more about our own vision of what simulation should mean and combine an Xbox style of design -looking at the technology, the hard-drive and Xbox Live- and how we take advantage of that. So the first thing we were doing was building an engine from scratch. Which, as any developer will tell you, sucks. It’s hard work.”

So Turn 10, backed by Microsoft’s formidable resources and its AI research center in Cambridge, began developing a game that they hoped would broaden the racing genre’s appeal and highlight car culture. “Our aspirations at the same time were pretty limited and pretty crazy,” says Greenawalt. “We love cars. I wrench on my car. We were a part of car culture, going to shows, going to Scenic, reading the news. Car culture was different back then, magazines were a thing, and we really thought we could bring a new idea into car culture from games and make games a bigger part of it. That culture was changing but games weren’t really keeping up. There has been so many trends. We wanted to stay in lock-step with a lot of those while not trying to be too edgy. Instead just be right in the middle of it.”

Drive time

Key to any racing game –from realism to arcade bombast-- is its handling model. Turn 10 went into Forza committed to full-blown simulation, which involved (and continues to involve) an enormous amount of research into the vast roster of cars and how they move on the road.

“We’ve had professional race car drivers in and I’ve had the opportunity to go and work with professional race teams in F1, Le Mans, even NASCAR teams, to get on their simulations and drive them.” says Greenawalt. “What’s interesting to me is when it comes to the most important part of a simulation; it’s the tyres. So we spend an inordinate amount of time researching tyres. We now know more about many of the tyre manufacturer’s compounds than they do because of the type of testing we do. All of that goes into making it a more believable simulation.”

According to Greenawalt, the plethora of information that modern cars provide can all be plugged into their simulation, while older cars such as three-wheelers with wooden frames are the most difficult. “We look at research projects the same way you would with technology towards graphics or AI or anything else,” he says. “We look at what is the next area of innovation that we want to bring into physics.”

Backed by enviable research and resources, Forza Motorsport released in May 2005 with a handling and tuning model every inch the equal of Gran Turismo. And it also had a few secret weapons that would help broaden the game’s appeal beyond petrolheads and become a fulcrum that a Forza community would build itself around. As the most fully formed online service on consoles, Xbox Live was beginning to hit its stride after the enormous success of Halo 2. Forza Motorsport leveraged its connectivity with both online racing, which its direct rival Gran Turismo 4 didn’t have, and the detailed livery editor, which allowed players to create and share paint jobs for their cars. A feature that became so integral to Forza that the studio snapped up some of its best amateur designers to sit at Turn 10 and design graphics for cars internally.

All of this resulted in a game that was just as detailed and, crucially, more accessible than the competition, leading to widespread critical acclaim. Forza Motorsport was off the grid in style.

The next laps

Coming so late in the original Xbox’s lifespan, these days the first Forza feels more like a proof of concept; a taster for Microsoft’s modest first foray into the console business. With the enormous uptake of its successor, the Xbox 360, it wasn’t long before Forza Motorsport 2 raced into the next generation to expand on the original game’s ideas. But it was the next game that really set Turn 10 as one of the industry’s premier racing studios.

“I think Forza Motorsport 3 was definitely a turning point,” says Alan Hartman, CEO of Turn 10. “The original pitch was a three product pitch, as in: this is going to take multiple years to build up. We weren’t going to compete out of the gate and it was going to take three versions to compete. I think what we did in three versions was establish our own voice and vision on where we were going with Motorsport. And 3 was the point at which we were no longer trying to prove ourselves, but we were established and we were looking to what we could do in the future.”

Forza Motorsport 3 reviewed brilliantly for its racing, while also introducing the concept of Auction House, which allowed livery designers to trade and sell their best work using in-game currency. After stellar day one sales, Hartman tells of the studio needing to turn off other features to keep the enormously popular Auction House up and running. “We got so much pick up on the car designs and what people were creating that we had a pretty sleepless night when we launched,” he recalls. “We had this crazy percentage of players, well north of 50%, who loaded up the game, got through the initial tutorial and started browsing the auction house, even though they didn’t have the credits to buy anything yet. And we were scrambling, because we just weren’t ready for that. So that night we were pulling machines from all over the place, configuring them and adding them to the server.”

Motorsport 3 remains the series best reviewed entry (92 according to score aggregator site Metacritic), and while the team expanded on their core, added other ideas like Kinect motion-control integration and even teamed up with Top Gear to keep forward momentum going on Forza Motorsport 4, the team felt it was time for the series to branch out.

New Horizons

“We lifted our heads up and thought about where we wanted to go,” says Hartman. “As we were looking how to expand the franchise, we looked at building out an internal studio, but it really made more sense to us to go off and get a fresh perspective. So we started looking around and seeing who was out there. And it was luck, coincidence, fate, whatever it is… there was this new group in England. We met over dinner at E3 in 2010 and it took off from there.”

That group was Playground Games, a new developer formed by alumni of some of the UK’s most revered racing studios of past and present. Codemasters, Bizarre Creations, Black Rock and Sony Liverpool were all well represented at Playground’s studio in Leamington Spa. And that legacy stood the studio in good stead when it came to taking on their first project.

“It was a serendipitous moment in time,” says Gavin Raeburn, founder and CEO of Playground. “In those early days, we said to ourselves that we wanted to be the Infinity Ward (the Call of Duty developer) of racing, which meant to be the most successful racing developer in the world both critically and commercially. Which is a big ask! To do that we needed to reach as large an audience as possible, which meant partnering with a big publisher and there are none more so than Microsoft. After that the pitch came quite easily. We looked at Motorsport and its strengths and an open-world driving game with that same handling seemed a perfect fit.”

The game was Forza Horizon, a far wilder imagining of Motorsport’s precise simulation. You would take fancy cars on the open-roads of Colorado during a music and motoring festival, competing in races, blasting past speed traps and taking part in Top Gear style ‘events’ like races against a helicopter. The game was announced in 2012 for Xbox 360 to some surprise; this was not Forza as anyone knew it.

“It needed to not be Motorsport,” says Ralph Fulton, creative director at Playground. “We went in there to pitch something that was complementary to Motorsport but conceptually separate from it. Motorsport does track racing. It did then, it does now and there is less room to expand on it because it does it so well. Our first direction was to find something else, and for us that was driving real cars on real roads. It was one of the few automotive experiences Motorsport didn’t already have wrapped up.”

Playground worked in close collaboration with Turn 10 to build Horizon. The handling model is lifted straight from Forza and subtly tweaked to make for easier open-world driving, while the work that goes into the code on each game benefits the other. Playground’s work on Horizon feeds into Motorsport, and vice-versa. “The beauty of this relationship is having two world class studios working on one technology base that has made Motorsport much better than it ever would have been,” says Hartman. “We wouldn’t be close to where we are with Motorsport 6 if we hadn’t had Playground in partnership on the technology.”

When Horizon released in October of that year, its flair and quality took many off guard. While there were some justified grumbles about AI and its sparse multiplayer, Horizon was very well-received, promising much from this new offshoot. Was the Playground team as surprised? “This is going to sound terribly hubristic but I wasn’t surprised at all,” says Fulton. “We had the luxury of seeing the game in development and knowing the team that was making it, I think we were confident in it. I think at its core the concept is really strong and I think execution is something our team did well back then and has just got better at since. What I love about that is that we have continued to improve in every single area of development since then.”

Fulton’s claim is backed up by the games that followed. Horizon 2 launched on both Xbox 360 and the nascent Xbox One, moving the festival to Italy and making for a solid improvement, if not a wild departure. Much like Forza Motorsport 3, however, it was the third Horizon game in 2016 that catapulted Playground into the elite. Its dense, beautiful Australian setting hosted a cornucopia of diverse, joyous driving; from Lambos to dune buggies. While Horizon was already known for its boisterousness, 3 really let the brakes off, making for the most exhilarating open-world racer since Burnout Paradise. A breathless reception followed.

“I’ve said before that Horizon 3 took six years to make,” says Fulton. “The way the team works together, the level of experience, the level of skill has all increased over that period. We’ve become more comfortable with exactly what the game is. And we’ve gotten better at the concepts of open-world design. The tools and processes have improved too, so it all kind of snowballs. You don’t forget what you’ve done at the end of a project and start again.”

There is always a concern after hitting such a peak, that the law of diminishing returns will kick in. “I’ve heard this a bunch of times recently from outside the studio and I take it as an enormous compliment to Forza Horizon 3, as the subtext is ‘how are you going to top that?’,” says Fulton. Inside the studio we don’t worry about that too much, partly because 3 is the best game we’ve made, but it stands on the shoulders of 2 and 1 and the work that the Motorsport guys do. I believe the experience of those games will make whatever we do next even better. We’re in a great position because 3 has broken out in a way we didn’t expect.”

Horizon has been such a success for Playground that the developer has recently announced that it is opening a second studio. A kind of expansion that is all too rare in the UK industry, the news is accompanied by no small sense of ambition. “We wanted to develop the one title and make it the best we possibly could,” says Raeburn. “But when we had an internal review of the studio after five years we thought we had achieved our original goal, which is fantastic, but where do we go now? And we want to be the most respected independent studio in the world. I know that sounds like quite a lofty goal but it’s a goal we want to shoot for, you have got to have aspirations. To do it that we need to release more titles. And to be the best, we should be in two different genres, which is what we’re setting out to achieve now.”

And while Playground at large is branching out into pastures new, Fulton insists that the original team is not running away from racing and is still passionate about the genre it has made its name in.

No finish line in sight

As for Forza the series; interesting challenges lie ahead. With the release of Forza Motorsport 7, Turn 10 are not only looking to cement its position but also serve as the flagship title for Microsoft's new 4K console, Xbox One X. Both Forza and its host technology has consistently driven the other and the trend is sure to continue, using Forza’s position as the world’s most successful racing series to sell shiny new boxes.

But Turn 10 won’t have the road to itself. In recent years the competition has not gone wheel-to-wheel with the new champion, as several racers struggle to find the same audience they did in the genre’s heyday. A fact that either adds a caveat to Forza’s success or makes it all the more remarkable, depending on your outlook.

This year is different, with Dirt 4, Project Cars 2, a resurgent F1 game and Need for Speed: Payback all lining up on the grid. And, crucially, 2017 will see the return of racing’s granddaddy, with Gran Turismo finally making its way to PlayStation 4 with GT Sport.

For Turn 10 and Playground, one can imagine the presence of such stringent competition will only drive Forza to keep ahead of the pack.

Forza Motorsport 7 and Forza Horizon 3 are out now. Xbox One X is released on 7 November