Playground Games has grown.
When I first visited the studio in 2014 for Forza Horizon 2, the crew still shared their building with a variety of other businesses. In 2018, when I again flew over to the UK for an early peek at Forza Horizon 4, there was a whole wing of the building filled with developers beavering away on something entirely secret and apparently unrelated to Forza Horizon. Remaining none the wiser, I was escorted past this area with a coy grin from Playground Games co-founder Ralph Fulton – now the director of this year’s highly anticipated Fable.
Today, in 2026, much has changed. Since my last time as a guest, Playground Games now operates in three separate buildings around Leamington Spa, all within walking distance of each other. The team no longer shares its original building with anyone else, either. With Fable being developed across town, every part of Playground Games’ original Rossmore House facility is now devoted to Forza Horizon. The rooms I’m toured through feel familiar to me – packed with desks, dev kits, and diecast cars – but now there are simply more rooms.
Make no mistake: Playground Games is bigger than ever.
So, as it happens, is Forza Horizon 6.
We’ve known for some time that Forza Horizon 6’s Japan is Playground Games’ largest and densest map to date. We’ve known, too, that Playground Games’ version of Tokyo City is set to be the biggest urban space the team has ever made, and five times larger than Forza Horizon 5’s Guanajuato.
Seeing it in person, however, is something else – and obviously extremely exciting. My first showcase of the game in action features a beaming red GR GT – the cover car for Forza Horizon 6 – threading its way from the map’s southern end to the north, up through the outskirts of Tokyo City and onwards to Japan’s Alps. For some stretches I watch as the team drives, and for others they defer to Forza Horizon 6’s new auto-drive accessibility feature. It’s a feature that came about in order to help players with finite energy they want to save for racing and events; energy they may be hesitant to exhaust by driving across the map to reach them (although art director Don Arceta jokingly concedes he’s found himself using it to eat snacks at times).
As with all previous Forza Horizon maps, this is not a 1:1 facsimile of any specific chunk of Japan; it is a greatest hits tour that captures the look and spirit of areas from all over the country, all bundled into a single racing sandbox. From the perspective of someone who has only ever experienced Japan as an occasional visitor, it is instantly convincing. As someone who loves the ability of video games to authentically place me somewhere in the world, I am immediately transported. The colour palette. The road markings. The recognisable bridges. The distinct vegetation. The team has the season set to spring for my very first glimpse of the game in action, which results in zipping past clumps of iconic blossom trees. In the sliver of the map we toured through they appeared satisfyingly occasionally, meaning they remained a novelty when they did so. That is, Playground Games has not turned springtime Japan into an unrelenting and inauthentic sea of non-stop pink – even if pink is the longtime hero colour of the Horizon Festival.
My general interest in Japan itself does not dwarf my interest in other places around the world famous for their scenic driving opportunities, and I should probably clarify that I’m not the sort of person whose admiration for Japan and its culture is the core defining part of my personality. Yes, I love ’90s JDM cars, Godzilla movies, and Japan’s massively affordable konbini beers when I visit. However, I don’t watch anime, I bounce off JRPGs, and… I hate raw fish and cold rice. I’m also way too tall for Japanese public transport, and I have a scar on my head because of it.
I do, however, firmly believe that Japan is an absolutely excellent setting for a Forza Horizon game.
“It’s one of the first decisions we make and it’s historically one of the toughest decisions to make because, as you say, it informs everything,” says design director Torben Ellert. “And there are many components to it that we’ve spoken about at length, but Japan has been a location we’ve wanted to do and it’s been on our shortlist for a number of games. But I think this was the first time that we felt that we could take a shot at it; that the fear was healthy rather than an actual panic response.”
“Each location offers new challenges, and obviously new gameplay and new experiences, but, for this one, Japan had a lot of challenges that we had to figure out and approach and try to solve,” adds Arceta. “And that was one of the things that, at least for myself, intrigued me to tackle Japan as a location.”
One significant rule that the Playground team took specific care to abide by was the fact that simply transplanting the Horizon Festival to Japan and dusting their hands couldn’t be enough. As highly desired as the location was, it could never be the only thing Forza Horizon 6 brought to the table. Happily, Ellert points out that the location does, in fact, give the team a lot of scope to make new features – which is something he cares deeply about.
“I think a lot of the discussions that we had all the way back in concept for this project were around, ‘Is it just Japan? Is it a previous game that is on a new map?’ says Ellert. “And our games are never like that. We always iterate, always innovate. We always introduce new features and push the game forward.”
“So, certainly from a design point of view, we were very careful and very aware of the fact that we needed to think about this as a game that was set in Japan, rather than that being almost like a core part of what the game would be. We couldn’t rely on it being Japan. We wanted this to be the most innovative Forza game that we’ve made; the most exciting game. The game where we push on a bunch of different axes and generate these new features that players would be really excited about. And it’s also in Japan.”
“Japan comes with so many expectations and everyone has their idea of what Japan is,” adds Arceta. “So, obviously, we had to look at those things, like Tokyo City and what they expect – and obviously mountainous roads, which both offer huge challenges for our team technically and gameplay-wise.”
“But it’s also trying to find the things that will surprise and delight players, and things that people don’t immediately think of Japan when they say it. And I think, as with all Horizon games, we always look for those in every location that we choose. For Japan, it’s no different. We have those nice surprises, and we’ve seen it with the footage we’ve shared so far. People are, like, ‘Does that exist? Is this for real?’ And it does exist in Japan, which is really exciting.”
Not too far into the tour, the GR GT reaches Forza Horizon 6’s version of the real-life Kawazu Nanadaru Loop Bridge – a unique, two-story structure that winds into the sky like a giant Hot Wheels track.
“You probably saw this in, I think it was in, the [Developer_Direct] trailer,” grins production director Mike Bennett. “Like, you just know the amount of drift videos we’re gonna get on this road, and I’m so looking forward to it.”
Some time after negotiating the bridge, the first hint of the Tokyo City skyline appears in the distance.
“This flow into the city here is part of how we thought about defining this Tokyo City as a set of experiences,” explains Ellert. “You see it in the distance, on the horizon. You approach it. You drive through suburbs and skirt around the middle of it. You move up onto the freeways and, if I was to turn left, you go down through downtown and the centre of the city.”
“Rather than try to 1:1 rebuild a place we create the individual elements of the experience of driving to a place.”
Entering Tokyo City I’m taken aback by just how vastly different it is to previous Horizon game urban spaces. This is spectacularly different from Guanajuato, and Edinburgh, but that’s not necessarily the pleasantly surprising part. Forza Horizon 3’s modern and vertical Surfer’s Paradise is the closest comparison, but the scale of Tokyo City is immensely more grand. Even skimming around the fringe of the city’s heart and escaping via the raised freeway, it’s clear there is so much more to this take on Tokyo City than has been typical of Horizon games.
“The headline is it’s our biggest ever, compared to Guanajuato; five times bigger than that last urban space,” says Bennett. “But also just the diversity of it compared to previous games is pretty massive as well.”
“I think a criticism that could have been leveled at some of the previous games, within Guanajuato we did have different areas within it – we did have different building styles, and they were really colourful – but maybe it was a bit one-note as you were moving around. There wasn’t huge amounts to separate one area from another.
“Whereas, I think with our version of Tokyo it’s very diverse. You’ve got the tall skyscrapers in the central area. You’ve got the suburban areas with the nice houses as you’re heading in. This is probably the craziest feature, actually, we’ve never done anything like it; just the multiplayered, multi-level road infrastructure that we’ve got going through the middle. Like, we had to go out and build new tooling to allow us to do this, leveraging what we’d learned through Hot Wheels.”
The diversity of Tokyo City stems from the fact that even the city itself, which is regarded as a biome of its own in terms of the