Established back in 2001 as Microsoft’s in-house racing game developer, it was Turn 10’s job to build a top-tier, first-party racing sim for the original Xbox. Xbox owners already had the much-adored but more arcade-oriented Project Gotham Racing series, but what was needed was something cut from the Gran Turismo cloth – a deep, nuanced, and realistic racing game packed with cars from around the world.

Turn 10 Studios creative director Dan Greenawalt.

Parking your brand new Pagani under so many birds is probably a bad idea.

Turn 10 Studios studio head Alan Hartman.

The original Forza Motorsport.

Bizarre Creations may be no more, but the spirit of PGR is still flickering at Playground Games.

“ [I]t was a massive game; the first Forza Motorsport was trying to do so much.

Forza Motorsport 2.

“ We’re spending well over the sticker price of these cars to build them in the game, with all the detail it takes to hit the next-gen bar.

Hard to believe Ferruccio Lamborghini started out making freaking tractors.

Forza 3.

Native 1080p and 30fps have been confirmed for the ambitious open-world Forza Horizon 2.

“ I’m not saying I know what the next 10 years are gonna be [but] I don’t see how it’s possible that the only thing Forza would be is Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon.

The Beast looking its best in a user-made livery in Forza Motorsport 4.

The result was the original Forza Motorsport, released in May 2005. Turn 10 came out swinging too, packing features yet to appear in Gran Turismo series (like car damage and user-defined decal application) as well as some high-profile vehicle manufacturers that were still noticeably absent from Sony’s venerable flagship, like Porsche and Ferrari.Turn 10 creative director Dan Greenawalt explains to us the original goals of the team.“Creatively, we’re inspired by car culture,” he says. “We’re inspired by game culture. 10 years ago all of us were a lot younger, but we also had dreams of what we wanted to do to make a difference in car culture.”This meant embracing ideas like user-generated content which, in turn, has evolved into building a community.“The Xbox One’s great for that,” says Greenawalt. “But the franchise, it you track its trajectory you can see how we’ve added more and more community features over the years and that’s been kinda the wellspring of inspiration, and it’s because it ties directly to the vision of the game.”The vision of the franchise, to turn gamers into car lovers and car lovers into gamers, is something Greenawalt is well-known for reiterating. He races through the mantra, smiling.“I’m kinda famous for repeating it,” he concedes, grinning, “but that’s what a vision’s for; it’s to be repeated, it’s to be the guiding light. And ultimately if we can look back in another 10 years and say that we’ve created people that are in love with cars, we’ve created auto enthusiasts in the process, I think we’ve done our job.”“10 years is a long time, especially in gaming,” adds Turn 10’s studio manager Alan Hartman. “I think, along with the passion for cars [and] the passion for making racing games, my passion is in making a great racing studio. In creating an environment where I like to say the best people in the world can do their best work.”“And that’s hard in the gaming world, having a studio that’s been around this long. The core people in the Forza franchise have been there since the beginning. Dan Greenawalt, Chris Tector our architect, John Wendl our content director, the foundation of that team. They’ve stayed; they’ve been able to do great innovative work year after year on the franchise.“That’s been kind of the secret to Forza’s success in terms of the market and building a great game for our fans; we’ve had a great environment, we’ve got a great studio, we’ve attracted great talent, we keep raising the bar on ourselves year after year.”In the early days of Turn 10 the studio boasted just two-dozen staff.“Way back in the beginning,” begins Hartman, “with the original Forza on the original Xbox, I think we had 24 people in the original team.”“But I showed up, actually, in the last four months of that title, and I think at that time there were an additional 40 people borrowed.”“We had them in corners,” chuckles Greenawalt.“They were strung down the hallway, spread out all over the building,” continues Hartman. “Because it was a massive game; the first Forza Motorsport was trying to do so much. Be a great racing simulator, be epic in its scope, bring online innovation.”Forza Motorsport 4 came around in October 2011 and, over the course of the following 12 months of post-release support, it expanded into a true monster with almost 700 cars from over 90 manufactures. From the frog-eyed Austin-Healey Sprite to the mental Lamborghini Sesto Elemento, the iconic Aston Martin DB5 Vantage to the slightly-hilarious GMC Vandura, and the wasteland-ready Ford XB Falcon to the legendary Porsche 959, Forza 4 ended up stuffed with a staggering amount of cult autos players largely couldn’t find elsewhere.Forza Motorsport 5, which launched with the Xbox One last November, is the most recent Forza game to hit store shelves. Unsurprising it’s been Turn 10’s biggest undertaking to date.“When we look at Forza 5,” begins Hartman. “What it takes to do that? Hundreds of people spread across the globe. We were leveraging the world-class engineering [at Playground]; we had about a dozen or more engineers helping out getting the Forza 5 engine ready for launch.”“We were talking earlier about what it takes to build a car now compared with the original Xbox. We’re spending well over the sticker price of these cars to build them in the game, with all the detail it takes to hit the next-gen bar.“These days the lines between Forza and real-life racing are blurring; for instance, last year motorsports fans worldwide watched as a Microsoft-backed Australian touring car, clad in green and sporting the logos of both the Xbox One and Forza Motorsport 5, clawed its way to an expectation-busting top 10 finish in one of motor racing’s most-famous enduros. Shortly afterwards the same car was available in Forza Motorsport 5 for fans to drive themselves at the same track.“We couldn’t have done that kind of activity [10 years ago],” says Hartman, “We just couldn’t have. We were struggling to just figure ourselves out as a team and our processes and our tool chains, and efficiently even make a car and get it in the game.”“That’s what it means about starting up a studio, starting up a team, and starting to build a big project like Forza Motorsport. Forza 2 was about coming to the 360 for the first time and really starting to figure out who we were as a studio. We didn’t really hit our stride until Forza 3, where were really starting to get this all figured out and we were really starting to reach out to try to do more, really dive into supporting the community, really dive into going after a monthly cadence of DLC.”Interestingly, as Forza has evolved so has the team’s relationship with car manufacturers.“All the car manufacturers are very different from each other, and they look at gaming differently,” explains Greenawalt. “But as a group there’s been a huge evolution over the last 10 years.”“10 years ago it was really just a licensing deal. We were interested in their IP, they couldn’t care less about games, so we would pay some money, get it in.“But over the years that area which they called ‘new media’, that’s where they put all games, became a much bigger part of how they marketed and how they built a fan base. [W]e saw our relationship with them change as they were approaching us and saying, ‘Well, we’d really like to have our car in your game now’ and it was a great time.“That was three or four, or five years ago. Now we’ve been able to debut cars that are at the true cutting-edge of technology and also at the cutting-edge of what car culture is. The McLaren P1 was debuted in Forza Motorsport 5, and we had that rising out of the stage at E3, and it was there at the booth. Rumour is that two McLaren P1s actually sold at E3 at our booth. Well, that’s a multi-million dollar sale right there, and that really gets the car companies to pay some attention. The Ferrari LaFerrari was also debuted in Forza Motorsport 5, and now with Forza Horizon 2 , the Lamborghini Huracán is being debuted.”The Forza universe expanded in 2012 with the arrival of the original Forza Horizon from Playground Games. Horizon took Forza’s driving dynamics and a selection of its greatest cars out onto the open roads of Colorado. A change of pace from the Motorsport series, Horizon focused on exploration and the joy of driving rather than lapping circuits in the pursuit of fractions of a second.“What Playground brought was this idea of an open-world, and what could an open-world mean, and the idea of music,” says Greenawalt. “And music and cars go so naturally together.”“And my feeling was, ‘Yeah! Yeah, that’s great! What else is coming? This is really exciting.’ But I don’t even think that’s the limit of Forza. I think Forza can continue to grow, because where you see people loving cars, and where you see people loving games, to me, that’s Forza. Now that’s obviously presumptuous, we’re not in those spaces necessarily yet, but I want to be.”Greenawalt admits there were other ideas but Horizon was the idea Playground was passionate about, and it was that passion that made them the right team. Hartman agrees.So are two Forza series the limit of the franchise? Greenawalt doesn’t know how Forza will grow, but he’s certain that it will.“I’m not saying I know what the next 10 years are gonna be,” he says. “But when I look at the trajectory of the last 10 years, 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.“I don’t have a design on where the series will grow to, but I’m very excited about it because I think for us to have a greater impact in car culture and gaming culture it has to be more than just Motorsport and Horizon.”Looking back across the franchise Greenawalt feels it’s the fans, rather than one particular game innovation, that have left Forza’s mark on the racing genre.“If I’m honest I think it’s the fans,” he says. “I think the time I am most proud of my career is when I meet our fans. Sometimes they’re critical and I think that’s fair; that’s what I want. I want a passionate community and people are passionate, positive and negative.”“When I’m most proud is when I meet people who got into cars or got into gaming because of Forza and I hope that our legacy is fans. That we have people that are into cars and into gaming because of Forza. That’s what I will be most proud of.“Now we do things like the green line, rewind, UGC, the livery editor, auction house, storefront and now with Horizon 2 amazing features like Car Meets, being able to have Drivatars in the open world, seamless multiplayer you can just jump into. Incredible features but, again, what it’s gonna do is get player against player, player cooperating with player, building passion, creating community.“[I]t’s not our features that make the fans. It’s our features that empower the player to make a fan of another player. That’s what gaming is about now. It’s not about just what we deliver; it’s about what they do with each other.”

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can find him on IGNor on Twitter, or chat with him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia