Endless Summer 2012: Reflection on Forza Horizon Fourteen Years Later

Looking back on the first trailer for Forza Horizon, it’s tough to put myself back in the shoes of who I was then, both in terms of the linear march of time, and cultural differences in our American misadventure. For example; Obama was still in his first term, Sebastian Vettel was about to win his third title in a row, dubstep was our current moment in American music, and the charleston was all the rage. I was a deeply depressed and closeted teenager, slowly dying in the same Houston suburbs that led to the eponymous Arcade Fire album, The Suburbs. 

Unlike 2012, I am now a 30 year old woman, married, living entirely on the other side of the countryI have lived through the dismantling of everything I thought my life would be thanks to both being Transexual and also you know, the hollowing out of online media. However, like 2012, we are involved in an international series of conflicts that seem to do nothing other than kill people of color and deplete our stock of military equipment. Neat.

While I had started driving lessons, I mostly was disinterested in cars until I discovered my love for all things automotive after a partner introduced me to Top Gear through the gateway drug of the Botswana special. Simultaneously, my childhood fascination with F1 was rekindled in anticipation of the first Grand Prix at COTA, a hometown track I loved so much I would eventually tattoo it onto my skin. New seasons of Top Gear and the endless reruns on BBC America became family TV in the dying days of old school cable. And naturally, as my love of cars deepened, it branched back into my lifelong love of Video Games. 

As funny as it is with the name of our show, I never actually liked Gran Turismo as a child. Through the lens of my adult self, I don’t understand why, as its entire vibe; jazz, some light drum and bass, and just an affection for both the high and low end of automotive culture, is a huge component of My Whole Deal™.  I did of course always love the arcade-racer Burnout franchise, and the second I got an Xbox 360, I think it was the first thing I bought that wasn’t named Halo 3. Hell, I will still boot up Burnout Paradise from time to time just to do a few laps of that wonderful map.

And while I had dabbled with more simulator adjacent racing games in the past, like Gran Turismo, or the EA Sports F1 games of the late 90s, I had mostly bounced off the genre, minus a brief fling with a borrowed copy of Project Gotham Racing 3 around the end of the Bush Administration. That all changed when I saw the famous (infamous?) Jeremy Clarkson We Are A Dying Breed trailer for Forza Motorsport 4, and was instantly captivated.

Forza Motorsport 4 felt confident in a way I don’t think the mainline Motorsport franchise ever was again. Maybe it was the disastrous launch of 5 along with the troubled Xbox One that knocked them off their pedestal? Anyways, Motorsport 4 hit me exactly in the heart, and became the only thing I played that year. It was the peak turn of the decade racing game; full Top Gear tie-in, with the legendary test track, and several of their dumber car sports events thrown in as little minigames. Plus, as someone who was basically only familiar with F1, Indycar, and NASCAR, focusing so heavily on sportscar racing was a perfect gateway drug to falling in love with Grand AM and ALMS before their eventual merger into the IMSA of today. Motorsport 4 was special, and continues to be special, because the Motorsport franchise never again reached those heights. 

And while Forza Motorsport was firmly established as Microsoft’s answer to Sony’s Gran Turismo, I remember a lot of hemming and hawwing upon Horizon upon its surprise announcement at E3 2012. It felt like a novelty project. A weird end of console generation oddity that would be a charming relic, and a spinoff that would be a footnote in the history of Forza, all the while giving Turn 10 all the time they needed to make Forza 5 the best launch title it could be for the Xbox One. (That is a whole different can of worms.)

But, what followed when Horizon was released was a revelation, a project that seemed to channel everything about the current moment in both car enthusiasm and music. The live action intro was unapologetically loud and in your face, with a sudden switch to rendered Colorado and the series’ DJ explaining the festival. While the vibe might be jarring coming from the Top Gear forward type of reverence from the Motorsport games, it’s immediately inviting you to buy into the idea of this festival, this racing world, and the idea that the music is going to be just as much a part of it all as anything.
 

The game immediately gives you a taste of the cover car SRT Viper as you race into the festival, all before actually giving you control of what would be your first car; the VW Corrado VR6, itself such an interesting and very honest choice for the loose story they’re trying to tell. It is a peak 2010s optimism story of someone being able to enter this elite world off the streets and win it all based on merit. You know, bullshit, but it’s at least fun bullshit! The game has characters! They aren’t deep or good, but they’re fun!

This game wasn’t the first to give open world driving games a coherent wrapper, but it’s truly stunning how basically every single entry into the genre (ie; The Crew, Test Drive Solar Crown, at least one NFS game I think)  that came afterwards owes this game such a tremendous debt to normalize the idea of these Festival based car playgrounds. Hell, we have events like Gridlife now that basically try to recreate the Horizon experience. Sure, they don’t take over entire cities and countries, but like, a music festival at a race track mixed with drifting and time attack events is the most realistic version of what Horizon would look like in the real world.

Revisiting a post-game save I have from when the game debuted, I am pleasantly surprised at how well it holds up and how grounded it feels, and how completely sure of itself it is. While there are a handful of the scripted showcase events that would be a core component of the franchise, they feel far more Real Thing Red Bull Could Do™ and less like the newest game’s race against A Literal Gundam. The festival is just a few stages in Colorado, and a handful of small town roads. Also, while the changes in season and weather in later games do add a layer of freshness and variety to the map, I actually find Horizon’s permanent late summer to be calming, and makes it feel less like it’s a permanent invasion of sovereign territory by a cult of EMD obsessed car fans.

Most importantly the cars feel correct. They feel like they have real weight to them, which might be part of the game prioritizing roads, be they tarmac or gravel, as this game’s version of offroading is far more rally than it is rally raid, like in more recent Horizon installments. Launching yourself into the air in a race is usually a Bad Time, which is a huge contrast to the newer games where a good launch is always right around the corner. It all feels sharp, and the escalating sensation of speed as you work your way up through faster and faster classes of cars is incredible, and honestly puts later entries into the franchise to shame. I actually can’t put my finger on why the escalating sense of speed feels so much clearer and in some ways more challenging to deal with, framerates making things too smooth perhaps? It reminds me far more of the ramp in speed in a traditional sim racer moreso than later Horizon games.

Recently revisiting the original Horizon, combined with my misadventures sampling other contemporary games in the open world driving genre only to be met with disappointment, I am saddened. Not by the obvious rotting reasons of nostalgia, but at the nature of modern games. Do I miss the time in my life when Horizon first came out? Absolutely the fuck not, I was a shell of who I am now, a homunculus just trying to survive Texas, but when diving back into the game, I do find myself missing how progressive and forward thinking and hopeful the early 2010s felt. Mourning the past, but acknowledging that trying to return to it is inherently fascist is a tough nut to swallow. I feel like a lot of us talk about Millennial Optimism in a way that betrays how much we were just blind to the state of the world, and how we can just vote our way back there. Hell, I can’t even look at Microsoft as a harmless publisher of software anymore, with their implicit support of the genocide in Gaza, and their devestation of the gaming industry through layoffs and union busting.

Plus, what do I truly want? To play the same game again with a new coat of paint? A finished product I can just mindlessly enjoy? And it’s so hard with games especially, as Forza has been in the loop of live service games for so long now that each game is always in flux, constantly changing and being tweaked, until support ends, and then the game is unceremoniously left behind, almost in a way that is impervious to forming long term attachments to. For instance, there is no legal way to buy a copy of Forza Horizon without finding a used copy. The Xbox 360 servers got unplugged years ago, and the game was never ported to anything else, as its music and car licensing rights lapsed years ago. Today it’s just a buried time capsule of Obama era optimism, speed, and a whole lot of dubstep.


Thanks for giving this a read folks! Now that I, Jordan, am free range without a day job, expect a little writing from me from time to time. BDS forever, fuck Microsoft, steal this game if you want to play it!