Forza Horizon co-creator’s new AAA driving game is “in a league of its own”

Forza Horizon 5 was the biggest launch in the history of Xbox Games Studios in 2021. It’s been an unstoppable juggernaut since then, with a recent PlayStation 5 port further cementing its popularity.  

But behind the scenes, the run-up to the fifth iteration was a turning point for the series’ co-creator, Gavin Raeburn. Three years before the game launched, Microsoft acquired Playground Games, the studio behind every Forza Horizon game.

“We sold the company, so I had three years before I could leave. That was my time to try and finish Horizon 5. I wanted to make it as big a success as possible,” Raeburn reflects to Traxion.

“COVID changed everything” for Forza Horizon 5

Like many games, COVID hampered Forza Horizon 5’s development and “changed everything.”

“It was an interesting time,” recalls Raeburn. “I was looking at Fable, which we were kickstarting at the time. We were building that team, and COVID changed everything. We had to make sure Horizon 5 was successful, and that meant I had to devote all my time to it.

“Then, much of my leadership team, who were on Horizon 5, stepped over to Fable to make sure it was in good hands. It was difficult as everyone worked from home.

“What I realised was how much we need to work as a team. You lose that when people are working exclusively from home. It’s like having a dismembered body. Everything’s working as it should, but nothing’s quite connecting. I think you can see a little bit of that in Horizon 5.”

While working on the fifth entry, Raeburn began envisioning a new take on driving games with untapped potential. But Forza Horizon’s continued success meant his idea couldn’t be realised at Microsoft.

“In the back of my mind, there was a game design I wanted to build. It was unexplored at the time, but it seemed to solve a lot of problems I’d seen in driving games over the years. I couldn’t build that at Microsoft or Xbox,” explains Raeburn.

“I had to make a choice: I either retire or go again. It took me probably a month of sitting on my hands at home to think, ‘I’m going again.’”

Working at Lighthouse Games is “a wonderful experience”

This led to Raeburn launching Lighthouse Games, a new studio in Leamington Spa housing a team of racing game veterans from the likes of Playground Games, Codemasters and Sumo Digital. Since 2022, the venerable team has been working on a secret “genre-defining” driving franchise that, ironically, will take on the open-world racing series he is best known for.

“It has been a wonderful experience,” says Raeburn. “All the best people I’ve worked with at Codemasters and Playground have joined me. I think we’ve got 50/60 people [from those two studios] here at Lighthouse, and that feels incredible. It’s like taking the best singers from the best boy bands in the world. 

“We have delivered 15 amazing driving games in the last 25 years and learned so much. They understand how to be the best, and they are the best, so that makes it a lot easier.” 

In just three years, the studio has grown rapidly, recruiting new staff at a staggering pace. When Lighthouse’s formation was announced in 2023, Raeburn recalls “there were eight of us working out of a rented house at the top of Leamington.” Two years later, the team has expanded to a whopping 150 staff.

An industry veteran, Raeburn looks back fondly on his time at Codemasters (where he spent 24 years) and Playground Games, yet enjoys the challenge of setting up a new studio from scratch.

“I think the journey is more important than the destination. I look back at what we achieved at Codemasters and then with Xbox. It was great, but that journey to get there was so much fun. We’ve had the time of our lives over the last few years, building to this point in a difficult time in our industry.”

Lighthouse isn’t the only new Leamington Spa-based studio working on an unnanounced AAA driving game. Headed by Forza Horizon 5’s former Creative Director Mike Brown, rival studio Maverick Games announced last year it’s helming a new narrative-led driving game to be published by Amazon Game Studios.

But while neither game has a release window yet, next year will see the release of Forza Horizon 6, the first new entry in five years. Raeburn isn’t fazed by the competition, however.

“There’s always competition. Complacency kills,” he says. “My way of looking at everything is how do we do the best possible work we can in every single area of what we do, and to treat it like your life depends on it. You can’t worry about the competition.” 

“We have to innovate”

While it’s shrouded in mystery for now, Lighthouse’s debut driving game promises to be a culmination of the team’s achievements at Codemasters and Playground Games to date.

“When you reach our kind of age, you realise that you’re only going to do this so many more times, particularly as development cycles become so much longer,” says Creative Director Jon Davis-Hunt, who previously worked on the original DiRT and GRID games, as well as the first three Forza Horizon titles.

Lighthouse is embracing the freedom of not being tied to an established IP like Forza. “One of the cool things about Lighthouse is that, by releasing a brand-new game, we have to innovate. That’s what makes it really exciting,” Davis-Hunt continues.

“In every way, we have to draw on everything that we’ve learned from previous games and apply that same ethos when Playground started. How do we change? How do we take racing, driving and car culture somewhere new?

“That’s exciting because you can’t do that once you have an established brand. Particularly a successful one because, by the very essence that it makes money, no one is prepared for you to say, ‘I’ll throw that in the bin. I’ve got this brilliant new idea.’”

Forza Horizon set the template for modern open-world driving games, inspiring competitors like The Crew Motorfest and Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. However, Raeburn feels that “innovation has perhaps slowed down” in the genre.  

“There are a lot of great open-world driving games out there, but I think there are a lot of similarities between them. All open-world games seem to be of a similar type now. Breaking that mould is quite difficult. So perhaps it’s not driving games alone that are doing that.”

“I didn’t leave Playground to build another Horizon”

As a result, Raeburn’s new driving game won’t simply be another Forza Horizon clone.

“I’ve said before, we’re not building Horizon. I didn’t leave Playground to build another Horizon,” says Raeburn, teasing that his new game is “in a league of its own.”

“I think Ivory Tower is doing really well with The Crew and catching up. But we’re trying to create something very different that can play in the same league. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s a delight to play our game every day.”

With established franchises like Forza Horizon and Gran Turismo dominating the landscape, fresh racing IPs with innovative ideas are rare and often reserved for the indie space.

Conversely, the studio’s unannounced driving game is a large-scale, AAA project, backed by significant investment from China’s Tencent. That’s a tantalising prospect for a talented team with a long pedigree of acclaimed racing titles, from Forza Horizon to Race Driver: GRID and Colin McRae: DiRT 2.

“There are not many driving games out there. You can probably count the large ones on one hand, with sim racers and then more niche ones after that. But there’s a big desire to play driving games,” notes Raeburn.

“I think the audience is larger than the number of games there are to play. People like driving when it’s done well, and not a lot of games do it particularly well. But when it’s done well, people really like to see it.”