The Secret Story Behind Forza Horizon 4 LEGO Speed Champions

November 24, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

It turns out that there’s actually a narrative explanation for why life-size LEGO® cars can be found during Forza Horizon 4’s Horizon Festival.

“According to the official canon, there is a partnership between the LEGO Group and the Horizon Festival, and they have blown all these things up to a human-sized scale so that humans that are attending the Horizon Festival in the game can go and explore the LEGO Valley and then go and explore all of these things,” said Mike Brown, creative director on the Forza Horizon series.

It’s a lost bit of fiction that explains the disconnect that happens when an open-world racing game with intricately detailed real-world cars suddenly becomes home to life-size versions of cars from the LEGO Speed Champions theme sets.

That mashup of Forza and LEGO bricks arrived on June 13, 2019, as the Forza Horizon 4 LEGO Speed Champions DLC. But work on it, or at least the early discussions that led to the partnership, started back in 2016 at an auto show.

“It was actually the Detroit motor show in 2016 where I met Michael McClary, who was running the Microsoft Forza side of things,” said Craig Callum, the design manager for LEGO Speed Champions at the time. “We were chatting about what we do and how much fun it is, and then it just kind of led to this idea that perhaps we need to get bricks into the Forza world.”

The idea kept bubbling up at the car shows Callum was attending to promote the LEGO theme. Eventually, he brought it to the folks at LEGO Games, who were, around the same time, discussing ways to broaden the reach of their titles. They felt they had the action-adventure games locked down with the excellent titles from TT Games, but they wanted to try other approaches, and racing seemed to have a very broad appeal. Combining the two felt like a natural fit and a solid solution.

Once onboard, the LEGO Games and Forza teams needed to figure out what a collaboration would mean. That included looking at everything from whether the title would be tied to Forza Motorsport or Forza Horizon, and whether it would be a stand-alone video game or a downloadable content add-on for an existing game. They also looked at doing something as small as simply adding a skin to an existing game to make it look as if it were built of LEGO bricks.

Eventually, though, the teams settled on developer Playground Games creating LEGO-themed downloadable content, or DLC, for Forza Horizon 4.

Scale became a discussion point, as they worked to determine whether the LEGO cars in the game should be made of tens of thousands of regular LEGO bricks or a smaller number of huge LEGO bricks. They ultimately decided to follow the design aesthetic of LEGO Speed Champions and have them made of oversized LEGO bricks.

Once the scale was sorted, both philosophically and technically, the team had to figure out where these LEGO Speed Champions cars would be racing. The result was LEGO Valley. The new location added through the DLC is packed with everything from its own LEGO city to a speedway and even a stunt park.

The team at Playground Games ended up working six to seven months creating the DLC, the most they’d ever spent on downloadable content for one of their games.

When it launched on June 13, 2019, it brought those wonderful playscapes, a LEGO Master Builder’s House, its own radio station, and five cars – including the 1967 Mini Cooper S Rally and cars from the original three manufacturers that launched LEGO Speed Champions.

While Forza Horizon 4 came out in 2018, it remained the most recent Forza game for three years, until November 2021 when Forza Horizon 5 hit. With the release of the latest, greatest Forza title, we asked Brown if he feels that Forza Horizon 4 and this LEGO DLC are now retired.

“That isn’t how we look at it actually,” he said. “I think with Game Pass, all the titles can stay alive alongside newer titles. They still have access to it through Game Pass. Obviously today, you should definitely go and check out Horizon 5, but I don’t think that closes door and Horizon 4.”

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.