Xbox’s Forza Horizon is a gaming franchise that pairs car racing with a breathtakingly detailed open world. They were set to launch their 5th title, this time, in Mexico.

But the genre's best days were in the rear-view mirror. Racing games get praised for their graphics, but not for being fun. To the average gamer, racing is challenging and repetitive. They’d rather play something like Fortnite, an expansive, unpredictable world that anyone can jump into. The last thing they want is to be stuck in a car, stuck on a track, stuck going in circles.

Despite racing’s waning popularity, Xbox set an ambitious goal: double Horizon 4’s players. That meant we’d need to get mainstream gamers excited about racing. To do that, we tapped into what they love most in gaming and expect least from a racing game: impulse.

“The written language provides a dozen or so punctuation marks to clarify our meaning, but only one that conveys our feelings.” - Geoff Nunberg, Award-winning Linguist

Before we think, we feel. Call it impulse, intuition, instincts, gut – it’s a visceral reaction before the action. In Spanish, you could even say it’s a symbol. In Xbox’s campaign for Forza Horizon 5, it came to life as the tagline ¡GO!

¡GO! is the rallying cry in “The Getaway Driver,” a film about a Mexican rideshare driver (played be Cristo Fernandez from Ted Lasso) who is stuck in a monotonous routine. Beholden to the whims of others, he rarely gets a chance to fulfill his own desires. Until one day a passenger enters the car and shows him how. In the style of magical realism, what unfolds is a wild adventure spurred on by his impulses, manifested as an alter ego.

A nine-day gamer workshop revealed an unexpected and powerful gaming motivation: impulse. In the real world, especially for young people, they’re told to control impulse. But some games encourage it and that freedom to make impulsive choices gives gamers a sense of creativity, control, and adventure.

Impulse is not what they expect in racing games. Fortunately, Forza Horizon 5 is a unique style of racing game. It is open-world. You don’t need to stick to the track, in fact you’re encouraged not to. There’s an extensive reward system that gives players points for trying new things and breaking the rules, all designed to make racing less about precision and control and more about fun and following your gut.

Our strategy: champion impulse as a virtue. The guiding truth is that in the game and in life, when you let impulse take the wheel, your world gets more interesting.

“The Getaway Driver” is a film about a Mexico City rideshare driver (played by Cristo Fernandez from Ted Lasso) who is stuck in a monotonous routine. Beholden to the whims of others, he rarely gets a chance to fulfill his own desires. Until one day a passenger enters the car and lo and behold, it’s himself. In the style of magical realism, a wild adventure unfolds spurred on by his own impulses, manifested in human form.

The spot launched on YouTube, IGN, via OOH at Microsoft Theatre in LA and the Microsoft Store in Times Square, and across Xbox and Karol G’s social channels (due to her cameo in the film) the day Forza Horizon 5 became available on Xbox Game Pass, driving people to download. Further reach came through a TikTok campaign where users were encouraged to show how they “¡GO!” with a custom song by Karol G.

Forza Horizon 5 was Xbox’s biggest launch ever with 10 million players in the first week. Impressive for any game, let alone a racing game. Over 2 billion impressions across social media, it truly spilled into the mainstream. More than people seeing the camping, gamers talked about it with 547,000 mentions across Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.

We succeeded in reaching our growth audience. In market campaign tracking showed we exceeded benchmarks set by Horizon 4 around campaign recognition, which tracks breakthrough and recall. We also saw a significant lift in play intent – the campaign got non racing gamers excited to play. And we even saw a significant lift in purchase intent for Game Pass (Xbox’s subscription service that offers Forza Horizon 5).