Forza Horizon as a series has taken players to many exotic locations such as Mexico, the UK, Australia, Europe and the US state of Colorado. Now, Forza Horizon 6 will take early access players to Japan. To learn more about the new game, and the process of getting Japan right, I sat down with lead game designer Dave Broughton and production designer Mike Bennett from Playground Games.
Appropriately, we had this conversation in a car park in downtown Tokyo, surrounded by many cars likely worth more than my apartment, along with a variety of Horizon accoutrements, all while a DJ pumped out tunes.
Up to that point, my day walking around downtown Tokyo and Yoyogi Park had felt a lot like I was walking in the game, albeit with more pedestrians and traffic laws. However, according to Bennett, whenever the team works on recreating a country or continent, the concern is less about accuracy and more about the vibe.
‘Whenever we build a game, we don’t aim to replicate that world 1:1,’ Bennett said. ‘That’s really important to say. This is Horizon’s version [of Japan].’
Forza Horizon 6 developer interview – quick links
Creating Horizon’s version of Japan
As Bennett explained, ‘We try to create a collage, little vignettes of what we feel we want to present. That may be the most beautiful locations or the most unique driving experiences. So, for us with somewhere like Japan, we wanted really strong diversity of biomes, and we also wanted to strengthen seasonal diversity as well.’
Previous games have had cities. Who could forget the Gold Coast in Horizon 3? But for Horizon 6 the team wanted to go bigger. ‘We really wanted to lean into a big modern city, which is something that we’ve not done for a few games now,’ Bennett said.
‘The last time we delivered something like that, was on Horizon 3. And yeah, with a location like this, it had to be Tokyo. But that required a tonne of investment from the team, and we’re super happy with how it turned out.’
ScreenHub: Forza Horizon 6 – bigger, better and even more gloriously addictive
Although a 1:1 recreation wasn’t the goal for all of Japan – that would take way too long to drive through, for starters – there were parts of the country that Bennett and the team wanted to be more accurate about.
‘Shibuya Crossing was one of the areas we wanted to recreate more faithfully than others, because it’s such an iconic spot,’ he said.
‘When we landed on Monday and got into town it was like, “Wow, I feel like I’m here in the game”. But even just the general architecture, the building styles and the whole overall aesthetic, it just feels like we’ve already been here by game.’
Broughton added, ‘The C1 route is this iconic elevated road, and we have recreated our version of that within the game as well.’
Keeping the Forza Horizon franchise fresh
In a game series where it’s already established that you can do anything you can possibly imagine while driving a car, it’s difficult to come up with new features and modes that make sense.
One of the big new features in Horizon 6 is the introduction of Time Attack Circuits – racing circuits you can drop into and do hot laps of until you’re happy with your time. Because there’s no loading in, and it doesn’t feel as formal as a race, it’s very easy to accidentally lose an hour or two to, as I found during the previews.
Other new features are tied directly to the setting. According to Broughton, Day Trip Stories were inspired by how car lovers travel around Japan.
‘When we’re building a game, we talk about wanting to give people that dream driving holiday, that maybe through time or circumstances is never going to happen. I can drive through Tokyo in the game, I can hear the sound ricocheting up all the buildings around me,’ Broughton says.
‘The Day Trip Story is run by your friend Mei who you meet when you first travel to Japan. You meet up with her and some other people, and she’ll take you to see some of the sights, but she is basically acting as your tour guide. She’ll give you little tidbits of information about the cars you’re driving or the location you’re driving to.’
A high stakes project
Japan is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, with over 42 million people (including over 1 million Australians) visiting the country in 2025 alone. It’s also been the country most requested for the franchise, and Japan has such a storied car culture, particularly around drifting (as immortalised in Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, one of the worst movies of all time).
Creating a version of the world that would appeal to all these audiences – locals, white people obsessed with Japanese culture, people who have romanticised their holiday, and those who have never been but were curious – was a lot of pressure for the Playground Games team.
For months after the announcement, the same ‘fans’ who had been asking for the next game to be set in Japan were complaining that the roads in Japan are too narrow for races, and that dirt doesn’t exist in Japan (an actual thing someone said), forgetting that anything can be real in a video game.
Rumours that the next Horizon game would be set in Japan have been rampant since Forza Horizon 2, but Broughton had good reason to wait. ‘You can only do Japan once, and we wanted to make sure we did it right.’
According to Broughton, the studio leaned heavily on subject matter experts. ‘We worked again with a cultural consultant on [Horizon] 6. We work with artists who are of the region, with musicians who are of the region,’ he said.
‘Although we don’t aim to recreate an area, we still want to be sensitive to the people that live there. We want to be respectful. We want to be celebratory of that location.’
Getting the details right
Broughton added that one of the things the team was wary about was the way characters speak, which required ‘some time working around’.
‘But our cultural consultant was amazing,’ he said. ‘I think the great thing with her is that her knowledge spans not only Japanese culture, but car culture as well. So, she really understood how those two worlds crossed over and interweave.
‘We could just test out ideas on her. It wasn’t just a case of just discussing dialogue. It was [asking] what music do you think you’d hear in this area? What would we see in this location? What’s popular right now in Japan?’
The consultant also ensured the street sounds were accurate, even with the radio off. ‘She introduced us to the idea of jazz kissa bars,’ Broughton added. ‘So, when you’re driving around you’ll hear a little bit of jazz playing out of cafes.’
Like nailing the prevalence of Telstra phone boxes in Australia a decade ago, part of the key to nailing the vibe of a city is capturing the objects and styles that people who see them everyday stop noticing, but become acutely aware of when they’re not there.
Broughton said the team also hired a Japanese graphic designer to work in house. ‘Her focus was things like signage, street markings, all the things that our team are blind to, to make sure that those things have been recreated faithfully.’
The team on Horizon 5, which was set in Mexico, also worked with a cultural consultant, but copped a lot of criticism for how the Mexican characters spoke in particular.
Broughton said that the key lesson the team took away from that was to keep pushing, but also acknowledge that the developers are human. ‘I think it’s always: just remember to question yourself, don’t make assumptions, and leverage the skills and experience of our consultants.’
But he also pointed out that the London-based team copped some flack for Horizon 4, a game set in the UK. ‘I don’t think we would ever say that we’ve got everything 100% right. We didn’t get everything 100% right when we set a game in our own backyard. But we made every effort, so I hope that people enjoy it.’
Generative AI and the landscape for game developers
Of course, because it’s 2026, and Xbox’s parent company, Microsoft, is a major investor in OpenAI, one can’t help but wonder how generative AI is being used at studios owned by Microsoft. The good news is that when I asked how generative AI was used in the making of Forza Horizon 6, Bennett immediately shutdown any concerns.
‘I think the 1st thing to say there is there’s no mandate or push on our team to use AI,’ Bennett said. ‘We are a team who handcraft our games and that’s still absolutely true. So, it’s not interwoven into any of our processes. Our artists create their art, our game designers create their designs, our scriptwriters write scripts.’
He added: ‘People like me who work on the production team will probably leverage things like Copilot if I want to go and have it collate a load of information from a Teams chat for an email, or if I want to whip together a spreadsheet, but it’s not something that our team use in creating the game that people are playing.’
Broughton emphasised that it’s always been the people and humanity that make Forza Horizon special. ‘We’ve got such a passionate team back in London who are working so hard. They’re putting their human creativity into that game. I think that’s what makes our game shine: making sure we’ve got the right team, talented team, super passionate about putting their mark in the game. So, yeah, we don’t use generative AI.’
Early access to Forza Horizon 6 starts for premium edition owners on the 15 May. Everyone else can jump in on Xbox and Steam from 19 May.
The writer was flown to Japan as a guest of Xbox.
