The history of Forza Horizon is intertwined with that of Project Gotham Racing, given that the series was born from the refusal of a relaunch proposed by Playground Games.
Among the many dormant intellectual properties in Microsoft there is also Project Gotham Racing , which for years has been stuck in the fourth chapter released in 2007: it seems that Playground Games, authors of Forza Horizon , had proposed a relaunch some time ago, but that Microsoft refused the ‘idea.
In an interview published by GQ and focused largely on the new Forza Motorsport, it emerged that Trevor Williams , head of the Playground team, proposed a project to relaunch the Project Gotham Racing series to Turn 10 and Microsoft, but received a negative response. Apparently, the Redmond-based company had no plans to recover the franchise, at least not on the same classic arcade racing style that characterized it.
However, there seemed to be interest in a new driving game with a more arcade footprint and Playground Games sensed that there was some room for maneuver for the proposal. Inside the same restaurant they were in to pitch the idea of Project Gotham Racing, they suddenly veered into a Forza Motorsport spin-off with a slightly different style.
“It was one of those stories where the steak turns to ash in your mouth, and I’m thinking, ‘how do we afford the flights home?’,” Williams said. “After five minutes, [Forza corporate vice president Alan Hartman] was like, ‘what would you do with Forza? Where would you take Forza?’ And we pitched what literally became Horizon, almost on a napkin.”
On the one hand, this represented the birth of a series that later became famous as Forza Horizon, which recently got its fifth chapter with Forza Horizon 5 , of which the first DLC dedicated to Hot Wheels was announced in recent days , but from the other part also demonstrates how there is very little hope of seeing Project Gotham Racing on the market again, given that Microsoft does not seem to have much intention of relaunching the series created by Bizarre Creations.