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automotive enthusiast, gamer, and designer · Experience: Microsoft · Education: Colorado College · Location: Greater Seattle Area · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Dan Greenawalt’s ...
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- Redmond, Washington, United States
Dan Greenawalt is the Creative Director across the critically acclaimed Forza Racing franchise. His passions for gaming, technology and car culture allow him to inspire and coordinate the talented creative teams around the world that create Forza’s award-winning experiences.
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By Luke Reilly
Updated: Sep 21, 2023 10:20 pm
Posted: Sep 21, 2023 8:00 pm
2019 was some year. Baby Yoda. The end of Avengers and Game of Thrones. Two separate Fyre Festival documentaries. The first documented case of COVID-19. Suffice to say, there was… plenty going on. In fact, just about all we didn’t get in 2019 was a new instalment of the Forza Motorsport series.
We were due for it, so to speak. Since the arrival of the original in 2005, a new Forza Motorsport had dependably arrived every two years – across three generations of Xbox console hardware – for over a decade. But there would be no Forza Motorsport in 2019, despite the fact it had been two years since the launch of 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7. There’d be no Forza Motorsport in 2020, 2021, or 2022 either.
Building the next evolution of the Forza Motorsport series was going to take time, because the next evolution of the Forza Motorsport series had to be more than just a product. It was going to be a platform.
Long-time racing gamers are likely well aware of the often-limited shelf life of licensed racing games; indeed, 2017’s Forza Motorsport 7 hit so-called ‘End of Life’ status back in September 2021 after just four years on sale. The delisting of Forza Motorsport 7 had no impact on those who had purchased the game, but it did mean it could no longer be purchased new thanks to expiring licenses. Greenawalt confirms that Forza Motorsport’s future as a platform going forward has seen the team change the way it needs to think about licensing, “and that forced us to double down on having a very agile game.”
“A game that we can move things around, we can showcase or spotlight, and we can move things in and out,” he says.
Moving anything out, of course, is a thorny subject, but Greenawalt states Turn 10’s “ultimate goal is to not have that happen.”
“So working and changing our licensing agreements, and how we work with licensors so that we have the ability to update them over time and not have it be so binary,” he says. “So is that a promise? It can’t be, because there are over a thousand licenses in our game. But we’ve tried to shift towards language that makes this more than just licensing, but into a bit more of a partnership where they are part of this game and they want to continue to be part of it.”
“But it’s going to take continuous tending. We had a rhythm of doing licenses and releasing, and now it needs to be a constant garden. That we’re just tending all of these [licenses] over time and keeping them alive. We don’t want to lose anything! We’re gamers too. So we want to play all that, and we want all that stuff to just grow over time.”
For his part, Greenawalt – who’s been involved with steering the series since its inception – remains visibly enthusiastic about the exciting changes he’s witnessed in the racing genre after nearly two decades of Forza.
Greenawalt believes the strength of the team has essentially upped everybody’s game.
“The team’s much bigger and it’s much more skilled, and I wouldn’t hire myself,” he grins. “I’ve lived to that position where I look back at my skills when I was in my twenties and I’m, like, ‘Nope; hard pass. You don’t get a job.’”
Beyond that, however, is the fact that racing games like Forza Motorsport no longer draw inspiration strictly from what’s happening on real-world race tracks.
“This has been the single largest shift, and I think it’s the hardest one for people to understand,” says Greenawalt. “We used to build a game that was a shadow of the real world. That is, in the real world, there’s racing – and then you can also kind of do it in a game. It’s gamified racing. What’s changed for the manufacturers and how they deal with us, what’s changed for the community, and what’s changed in racing is that we’re no longer a shadow of the real world. We’re a different world.”
What’s changed... is that we’re no longer a shadow of the real world. We’re a different world.
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Jun 16, 2017 · "On the Xbox One, Forza Motorsports 6 ran at a native, constant 1080p and a rock solid 60fps," Turn10 creative director Dan Greenawalt tells WIRED. "We had a game that was well optimised for...
Sep 14, 2017 · Dan Greenawalt discussed several topics we brought up, and gave us some interesting information relating to Forza, and how the number of monthly active players has jumped from the four million...
Sep 11, 2023 · Forza Motorsport learned a few lessons from Forza Horizon, and even from other Microsoft first-party developers, such as Starfield ’s Bethesda Game Studios. That’s according to Turn 10 Studios...
Jan 25, 2023 · “ Motorsport is about competition, and threat, and really going to war with your machine,” Dan Greenawalt, Microsoft’s general manager for the Forza Motorsport franchise, told Polygon last week.
