(mellow techno music)
- Forza Horizon 4 dropped a few weeks ago,
and I've been playing it pretty much nonstop.
But there's something weird going on.
While the game's roster of nearly 450 cars
is all well and good, there's one glaring brand omission.
To the dismay of fans all over the world,
Toyota decided they didn't want their cars in Forza Horizon.
This on Wheelhouse, we're gonna find out why.
I think for a lot of us,
video games are a huge reason why we're into cars.
Some of my favorite cars to this day
are ones that I remember driving with a controller.
The Evo 6 in Gran Turismo 2,
the Ferrari 512 in Cruisin' USA,
team Team Oreca Viper in Gran Turismo 3,
the Dodge Charger in Midnight Club 3.
The list goes on.
Racing games are many people's
first tiny step into the car world.
Also, big shout out to Midnight Club 3.
Best soundtrack of all time.
If you know, you know.
♪ House real big ♪
♪ Cars real big ♪
♪ Belly real big ♪
♪ Everything real big ♪
- But before we talk about Toyota, we need a little context.
Racing games have come a long, long way.
The first racer ever was called Gran Trak 10,
by Atari, released in 1974.
This was before gaming consoles.
You actually had to go out into the real world
and play it at an arcade.
I know, it's terrifying.
They didn't even have Discord back then.
The cabinet itself weighed around 400 pounds
and contained a real steering wheel and gear shifter.
Pretty ahead of its times, for the mid-'70s.
Pole Position featured a somewhat accurate version
of Fuji Speedway, over in Japan.
What really set Pole Position apart
was the third person view behind the car,
which would be the standard to this day.
Because the game inspired so many imitators,
many video game historians call Pole Position
one of the most influential video games ever made.
One of the first games to use a licensed vehicle
was Outrun, developed by Sega in 1986.
And this is where car brands started
seeing the possibilities of linking
the virtual world to the real one.
Players drove a Ferrari Testarossa Spider,
which for the time, looked amazingly realistic,
and was definitely a Ferrari
because it had a pixelated prancing horse badge on the back.
The game's designer, Yu Suzuki,
said he drew a lot of inspiration for Outrun
from a long trip to Europe, where he just
drove around for two weeks.
That sounds nice.
(engine revving)
(laughing)
The game was a huge hit, and inspired
another Japanese company to make their own game
chock-full of real-world cars.
In the early '90s, Poly's Entertainment
was a development group within Sony,
focused on making games for company's
latest home entertainment system, the PlayStation.
They didn't call it the PlayStation One,
because they didn't know there were gonna be three more.
Kinda like how people didn't know
there was going to be a World War II,
and that the the Great War was gonna
last more than two weeks.
Anyway, Poly's had released two games
in their Motor Toon Gran Prix series,
a cart racer that took a lot of inspiration
from the Mario Kart series, and what I can only guess
were some seriously righteous hallucinogens.
In spite of the strangeness, critics praised
the Karts' handling, because they felt
a little more real than what people were used to.
It turns out, Poly's what about
to give people more of that feeling.
A lot more.
In 1997, Poly's Entertainment released the game
that would forever change the course of the company,
and racing game history as a whole.
Gran Turismo was in development for five years,
and was a huge hit when it finally released.
Critics and players alike praised Gran Turismo
for its hyper-realistic graphics, driving physics,
and stacked real-life car roster.
Gran Turismo featured 140 cars from 11 manufacturers.
That's really impressive when you think about it.
Even today, large companies don't really
come together on a lot of things,
unless they own each other.
And here's this little game, published by Sony,
with tons of real cars people actually know.
That probably felt a little ahead of its time
for everyone involved.
In 16 years, Gran Turismo One sold
nearly 11 million copies, making it
the best selling original PlayStation game ever made,
and that's just the first installment!
But don't think that they didn't have any competition.
Electronic Arts had released The Need for Speed
for the Panasonic 3DO in 1994,
which also featured real-world handling.
But the car roster was tiny by comparison to Gran Turismo's.
However, the Need for Speed series
had something Gran Turismo didn't: cops.
(hard rock music)
In the head-to-head mode, player didn't just have to beat
the other driver, they also had to dodge traffic,
as well as get away fro Five-Oh.
Players freaking loved this, and the police became a staple
for the Need for Speed series.
But the Fuzz wasn't the only thing
Need for Speed had over Gran Turismo.
Need for Speed also had Porsche.
So the way licensing works for video games,
is that developers and publishers
have to pay companies to use
their likenesses and logos inside the game.
Otherwise, you're probably gonna get sued.
When EA was developing Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed,
they very wisely worded the contract
so they would be the sole developers
with the right to use Porsche branding in their games.
If you wanted to drive a Porsche from your couch,
you needed to buy Need for Speed.
While this might have been a big disadvantage
for other racing games, there were
some unexpected benefits for other brands.
R-U-F, or "Roof"? "Roof"?
I'll say "roof". ♪ Who let the dog's out? ♪
♪ Woof, woof, woof, woof. ♪ - RUF? RUF? RUF? RUF?
RUF was a German auto manufacturer
that had been building their own
Porsche-inspired sports cars since the mid-'70s.
At first, the company would tune up Porsche 911's
and then sell them.
But then they started buying what are called
"bodies in white," directly from Porsche.
These are assembled chassis, without
any other components on board.
RUF would then take these bodies in white
and finish the cars with parts of their own design.
This officially made RUF its own manufacturer
in the eyes of the German government,
completely independent from Porsche.
Soon after the EA/Porsche deal,
developers, including Polyphany Digital,
figured out how they could get cars
that looked like Porsches in their game,
without actually having Porsches in their games.
See where this is going?
They might not have been real Porsches,
but they looked the part.
And for 95% of players, myself included,
that was good enough for them.
Because of EA's exclusive deal with Porsche,
gamers around the world know who RUF is.
Fortunately for us, maybe unfortunately for RUF,
EA's deal with Porsche expired in 2016,
and pretty much immediately, Porsches were
showing up in games like Forza,
Gran Turismo, and Assetto Corsa.
And like that, developers no longer need the RUF workaround.
So, Toyota, what's going on with them?
Like I said at the beginning,
they recently and quite abruptly
stopped letting studios use their cars in games.
Gaming site Kotaku reported on an editorial
in a Japanese newspaper, connecting the slide
in Japan's car sales, to the rise of video games.
The editorial even quotes a Toyota exec as saying,
"Home game machines are no good.
"Playing something that realistic
"makes the needs for cars disappear."
I'm sorry, what?
If anything, driving a virtual Toyota in Forza
would make me want a real Toyota even more!
So, are there any other hints?
There's been some speculation that,
since Toyota has only one sports car in their lineup,
the 86, that they don't feel that
product placement is worth it.
On top of that, most every other Toyota
people want in their games are old models,
like the MR2, Celica, the AE86, and the Supra.
Toyota might feel that if all the cars gamers see
are old, then gamers might think
the Toyota brand has fallen off.
And that's not a good look.
As a counterpoint, though, there are
plenty of brands with mostly old lineups in racing games,
so that argument doesn't really work for me.
I think it's worth remembering that,
while it may not make sense for us fans,
Toyota doesn't have any obligation
to put their cars in our games.
Big companies make weird decisions all the time,
and they don't have to tell us why.
So for now, it remains a mystery.
And it's possible that Toyota will miss out
on gaining some younger fans.
But Toyota, I swear to god.
If the new Supra isn't in Forza next year, after the launch,
we're all gonna riot.
We know where you live.
Hey, we have a subreddit on Reddit now.
I'm a moderator.
R/donutmedia.
Come check it out, come subscribe.
We look at the weird car stories that affect you,
every week, here on Wheelhouse.
So hit that yellow subscribe button right there.
I mentioned the AE86, check out this episode
of Up to Speed on it.
Check out this episode of Wheelhouse.
Be nice, I'll see you next time.