Inside Forza Motorsport, Part I: Where The Magic Happens
Voting for the Forzalopnik downloadable car pack may be history, but the next phase of the project — making your choices reality — has begun. Welcome to Microsoft's Turn 10 Studios. This is where it all goes down.
What The Heck Is All This Forza Business?
The backstory, in case you came in late: One month ago, we announced a partnership with Turn 10 Studios, the Microsoft subsidiary responsible for the hyperaccurate Xbox driving game Forza Motorsport 3. We decided to do something big. We wanted monumental, we wanted epic, and we wanted you — Jalopnik's readers and vocal commenters — to have a say in it.
The mind-meltingly massive project that resulted was dubbed Forzalopnik. It produced two custom-built downloadable car packs, one chosen by Jalopnik and Turn 10 staff, the other picked by Jalopnik readers
in a heartbreaking series of polls. The former is scheduled to be revealed in March; the latter pared 120 cars down to 14 over the course of one week and generated more passionate commenting than any post in the site's history.
Now it's time for the next step. This week, we'll take you inside the making of one of the most successful driving games ever built. We'll talk to the people who matter and take a close look at the gearhead cave where they work. We'll step inside a dynamometer room and have our eardrums blown out during an audio session. And we'll demystify some of Forza's hoontastic realism by gazing into the heart of the game's hypercomplex physics engine.
What's So Cool About The Making Of A Video Game?
In a word, everything. The Turn 10 crew is nothing if not Jalop to the core. We discovered early on that these people are like us — they wrench, they race, they modify cars, and they spend way too much time on the Internet. They also have an unhealthy attachment to physics, Mac and Jack's IPA (there's a kegerator in the lounge-chair-filled conference room), and the art of Getting Cool Stuff Right.
On that note, enough with the foreplay. We'll get to the deep dive later, but for now, have some eye candy. This is what the inside of a car freak's game studio looks like. In case you hadn't noticed, it kind of resembles a garage. Dig in.
(Note: If you'd like to see the above images and their captions on a single slow-to-load page instead of a gallery, click here.)