40 years ago, video game racing was born. 10 years ago, Forza Motorsport entered the scene. With the introduction of Forza Motorsport 6 as real as it gets racing has become a reality. Every pixel and line of code ever written has been leading up to this moment. To celebrate this we decided to pay homage to these milestones by racing through video game history. The film takes the cover car from the latest Forza game, the 2017 Ford GT, and follows it as it travels through worlds from racing games of the past. In order to creatively show this passage of time, we recreated the song for each section using the retro technics available in that era. The music drives the action forward as the vehicle travels through time, ultimately towards the landscape of the current Forza game.

The film shows the evolution of gaming, taking iconic games from the last 40 years and bringing them to life in a contemporary way while staying true to the most iconic elements of each. The music does the exact opposite, taking a modern recognizable song, and recreating that song for each era embracing the musical limitations of the hardware from each time period. At the beginning of the film we used low fidelity computer generated sounds in a simple arrangement, only the main melody being recognizable from the original song. As the picture evolves through each chronological world we also evolve the song, staying true to that time period in instrumentation and style while becoming more and more recognizable by introducing more complex instrumentation and arrangements. Finally building to the fully realized original song.

Most importantly, we saw that the campaign had a significant impact on our audiences. General population consumers who recognize the campaign were +45% more familiar with the game and had +30% more anticipation for it. In addition, the perception that “Forza is fun to play” was higher amongst recognizer groups by as much as +22%, achieving our goal of reminding people that racing games are fun.