- Before we get into the story,
if you can do me a favor and just hit that like button
it really, really does help a lot in the algorithm.
And the algorithm is technically a robot
that controls part of my life.
So I wanna get some of the control back.
Let's talk about Forza.
It's the game that literally opened
up the world of digital racing.
The first console racer that let you yell at other people,
online and the only racing game
to knock the mighty Grand Turismo from its golden throne.
This is everything you need to know
to get up to speed on Forza.
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- The Sony PlayStation turned
the video game world upside down,
when it came out in 1994, the graphics were next level.
You could play fricking CDs with it.
And most importantly,
it boasted a huge number of popular games.
The most popular game was a little piece
of gaming history that I like to call Grand Turismo.
Now Grand Turismo was the revolutionary brainchild
of Japanese programmer and car enthusiast,
Kazunori Yamauchi.
Before the OG grand Turismo game came out in 1997,
racing games were either boring sims
that took themselves way too seriously
or cartoony Mario cart type chaos.
Grand Turismo's advanced physics engine,
cutting edge graphics and a huge selection
of real life cars changed everything.
It was a smash hit with gamers and car nerds alike.
A lot of people in our generation
got into cars because of Grand Turismo.
Kazunori Yamauchi was a car nut and it showed,
the first game in the series featured
a ridiculous 178 playable vehicles.
Everything from Dodge Vipers to Mazda Demios,
and all those cars handled
like their real life counterparts.
Kaz and his team spent years gathering data
to make the game as realistic as possible.
Then, they spent years dialing it back a little bit
to make sure that the game was still fun to play.
Now we did an episode on Grand Turismo,
and in my might sound like we're doing another one,
but we're not, I'm gonna talk about Forza soon.
And if you wanna know more about that,
I'm gonna put the link to that video in the description.
Anyway, the first Grand Turismo
was the best selling game on the PS one.
Which helped Sony move a record breaking,
100 million consoles, which helped them develop something
that would turn the console gaming world upside down,
even harder.
To top the first PlayStation,
Sony had a little trick up it's sleeve.
The sequel would be a media system that could play DVDs!
The company even envisioned it as competition
for the personal computer,
which spooked little Bill Gates down Microsoft way.
He worried that a system like the PS two,
could eventually put Microsoft out of business.
Gates first tried to partner with Sony
to develop the PS two software platform.
But Sony was like, "no, we got this.
Thanks nerd.
We'll take it from here."
Then he attempted to buy Nintendo,
and Mario was like, "get the out here, you freaking nerd.
Go back to Jeffrey Epstein's island."
According to a Microsoft employee who was there,
they quote, "they just laughed their asses off.
Like imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you.
That was kind of how that meeting went."
So at the rockus laughter
of Japanese businessmen ringing in their ears,
Microsoft started developing their own console.
The Xbox.
The result was a huge technological achievement
but the tech specs didn't mean much,
without good games to back them up.
Well, Halo was an immediate hit for Microsoft,
but otherwise Sony basically cornered the market
on popular games that didn't star Italian plumbers.
This included a certain racing franchise
that had already sold 35 million copies.
Hmm I've got it.
What if we stole their idea?
And that's exactly what Microsoft did.
Forza Motorsport was announced in 2004,
as the Xbox's answer to Grand Turismo,
a highly customizable racing sim,
with real cars and real courses.
Microsoft tapped Dan Greenwalt to head the project.
Now he had previously worked as a designer
for the arcade style franchises,
Project Gotham Racing and Midtown Madness.
And he was a real car in enthusiast,
but he actually got into cars through racing games,
which was his first love.
This guy was literally made to make a racing game.
Early in the development process,
Greenwalt came up with a mantra
that became the mission statement
for the whole Forza franchise.
Turn gamers into car lovers and car lovers into gamers.
Now that's pretty similar to our mantra here at Donut,
turn donut lovers into car lovers and car lovers
into an indestructible army of undead.
Greenwalt and his team of 24 programmers,
designers and other math people founded Turn 10 studios
and they started Forza development,
with the all important physics engine.
They first created a highly realistic driving simulator
that almost perfectly imitated real life,
but like the Grand Turismo team before them,
they realized that real life isn't fun.
It's just, you wake up, do some crap,
you go to bed, you wake up, you do some crap,
you go to bed.
So they loosened up the physics.
Grand Turismo had nailed its goal
of becoming a chill version,
of the real life driving simulator,
so hard, that it basically created a space
for Forza to slot into.
One notch, more chill,
and yet still several notches more realistic
than any other racing game titles at the time.
You couldn't throw any fricking turtle shells
or anything in this game.
Forza's ultra-flexible car customization options
were a key ingredient to this.
Players could create custom Photoshop style visual layers
for each section of your car.
And each section could handle up
to 100 design layers a piece,
you could basically design your own livery,
which had never been done before.
If your lifelong dream was to drift around the Nurburgring
in a Ferrari Enzo that says pubes on the side,
Forza Motorsport is your game.
Forza also let you go deep on car tuning,
like all the way down to the tire pressure.
Sure, the Forza title only had 231 cars,
compared to Grand Turismo 4's insane 721,
but there were enough options
that literally every person who ever played the game,
could create their own one of a kind car.
And let's be real, 231 cars is more than enough.
Jay Leno.
There were 33 different Miatas in Grand Turismo 4.
33!
That's how old Jesus was when he died!
That's one Miata for every year of Jesus' life.
Now let's be honest, besides the custom Liberty thing,
the first Forza Motorsport sounds a lot like Grand Turismo.
Dan Greenwalt and his team knew that they had
to figure out, a way to set their game apart.
Now here's something weird that you might not know.
Part of the original plan was
to make Forza into a car collecting game.
Microsoft even hired a designer,
away from Pokemon to help establish that,
gotta catch 'em all feel.
Every car and part in the game,
had a rarity rating based on the region
that you select when you start the game,
USA, Europe, or Asia.
So for example, it's easy to get a Camaro
if you're playing in the US,
but good luck trying to find a Skyline GTR.
Greenwalt and his team hoped that this would help build
a virtual racing community by encouraging players
to trade cars and parts.
So that car collecting thing, it was different,
but it really wasn't something that got people excited.
Without something unique and exciting,
Microsoft's big money Grand Turismo challenger
was doomed to fail.
And Bill Gates hates failure.
Thankfully Forza's saving grace was the obvious oversight,
in Grand Turismo franchise.
The biggest thing that called the games tagline,
the real driving simulator into question.
I'm talking about crash damage.
(slow motion) Crash damage.
Bop your Lister Jaguar into a wall
at 200 miles per hour in Grand Turismo 4, what happens?
You bounce back like it never happened.
The car looks good as new.
In Forza, the cars could get (beep) up,
just like in real life.
Paint scrapes, smashed windows, dangling bumpers,
it all added another level of reality to Forza.
And if you did enough damage,
your car's performance would start to suffer.
Up until this point Grand Turismo's cars would stay
in basically perfect condition,
no matter how you drove them.
Which is really weird considering how tirelessly
the GT team worked, to make things very realistic.
Maybe they couldn't afford
to crash all these cars in real life,
to get the real physics data,
which is obviously how Forza pulled it off.
Bill gates is really, really rich, you guys.
He got a bunch of orphans
to crash cars into walls and stuff.
I've seen the footage, it's gruesome.
Forza's realistic car damage was such a win
that every Grand Turismo game afterwards
has replicated the feature.
They got their own orphans and they smashed them into walls.
This wasn't the only realism one up Forza
had on Grand Turismo.
Greenwalt and his crew gave Forza Motorsport
the most realistic NPC AI yet,
thanks to Xbox's advanced computing power.
To do this, Microsoft brought in a robotics expert,
from elsewhere in the company,
where robots fully replaced the human staff I bet.
This expert created an artificial intelligence system,
called Drivatar.
Yep.
It learned to mimic your racing style
and even improve on it.
Players could simulate races
to see their own style in action or race computer cars
that would drive just like them.
Which for a lot of us is pretty embarrassing to watch.
So we have full custom paint jobs,
an active Pokemon influence,
crash damage, and all that stuff set the OG Forza apart
from Grand Turismo.
Now there's one thing left,
that really made Forza Motorsport stand out,
the ability to race people in parents' basements
all around the world.
Forza was developed to be played online via Xbox live.
It's hard to believe today,
but no Grand Turismo game at that point,
could be played on the internet.
Xbox live made it easy.
It was arguably the biggest single thing
that set the Xbox apart from the competition.
And online racing was arguably the biggest single thing
to set Forza apart from Grand Turismo.
Suddenly, you you could race anyone, anywhere, anytime,
and you didn't even have to ask your mom
if they could sleep over.
I guarantee that if you walked into a college dorm in 2006,
someone was in the process of losing Maple Valley Raceway
to an 11 year old in Japan.
Online play, is now an integral part of gaming.
Forza was one of the very first games to embrace it.
And when it was released in 2005, Forza Motorsport
was universally praised.
It sold 100,000 copies in the US in the first week,
one reviewer called Forza,
"the most realistic console racer ever made."
But the OG Forza came out right at the end
of the original Xbox's lifespan.
Microsoft was already getting the more powerful Xbox 360,
ready for release.
So Greenwalt and the Turn 10 crew,
quickly shifted gears, to turning out sequels.
After the success of the first Forza game,
Greenwalt's team grew massively,
and they pumped out three sequels for the 360,
each one was well received, but the improvements
over the original weren't exactly monumental.
Because of this software slump, the franchise lagged
well behind Grand Turismo in popularity.
It wasn't until the fourth sequel, 2012's Forza Horizon,
that turn 10 studios literally opened up the world
of console games to a new,
horizon.
Now Microsoft wasn't stoked on Forza's sequels
lagging behind Grand Turismo.
Greenwalt knew his team had to look at the game
from a totally different angle,
if they wanted to keep making it.
An easy way to do that,
is to bring in outside brains with different perspectives.
So Turn 10 took pitches from other developers,
a British company called Playground Games,
throughout a wild idea.
Why not let gamers drive their cars everywhere?
They liked it.
Forza Horizon took everything gamers loved
about the track based series and put it in an open world,
where you get points for long drifts, huge jumps,
street race victories, smashing through fences, cool stuff.
The whole game was set around
the fictitious Horizon Festival,
in the not fictitious Colorado, unless,
is Colorado real? I don't know.
Let's be clear, Forza Horizon
wasn't the first open world driving game,
but it stood out because it didn't compromise
on the things that made fours a Motorsport games so great.
Instead, it added more of a relaxed, varied,
chaotic game play to the established Forza mix.
Who plays the most video games? Teenage boys.
What do teenage boys like?
Chaos!
Horizon was a hit, Euro gamer said,
"Forza Horizon, exchanges infinite laps
and bottomless grind for an actual structure
and sense of adventure."
IGN said, "Forza Horizon and Playground Games
have rewritten the rules of the road."
I said, look, what I painted on the side
of my Ferrari Enzo guys, says pubes.
Forza's Horizon series, has now far outsold
the original Forza Motorsport games.
Forza Horizon 4, was the most popular game
for the Xbox one, outselling Call of Duty,
Grand Theft Auto and Halo.
Those games are massive.
And before Grand Turismo came along,
this sort of thing basically never happened,
with racing games.
So hitting number one was a major milestone
for Forza to reach.
And in late 2021, Forza Horizon 5,
had the biggest launch ever of any game
on any Xbox system ever,
10 million players,
drove around the game's enormous open world version
of Mexico, in the week of its release.
And in a way Forza Horizon is a perfect execution
of Dan Greenwalt's original goal,
to blend car culture and gaming culture.
And with the massive success of the series,
it makes sense that Microsoft would want
to keep expanding the Forza franchise,
according to Greenwalt, "I don't see how it's possible,
that the only thing Forza would be is Forza Motorsport
and Forza Horizon.
It's gonna continue to grow.
Just as games have continued to grow."
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