On that point - a part of the spirit of Forza Horizon is providing recognisable virtual tourism to people, right? But you also want to avoid falling into stereotypes - which is easy enough to do when you're portraying the UK, you live here. But when you're tackling a culture like Mexico's, how do you get that balance right?
Mike Brown: It's a great question, and I think there's an answer that will touch on a few different areas of Mexican culture. The answer is - we're a UK developer, a predominantly British team, and so we need to work with people from Mexico. From the very start, on our research trips we were working with locals who were from Mexico, who were actually photographers, but they really knew their local areas, they knew the sights, they knew the things that were the most beautiful things in their region of Mexico, and they were able to act as something of a tour guide for us and help us to explore and find all these amazing things. That helps us explore the world and make sure we're representing it, and make sure that the things that Mexicans would want the world to see, we're putting in the game.
As well as that, though, as I touched on, there's this really broad and beautiful culture of Mexico. So we've worked with Mexican artists as well - we saw one of the murals in the gameplay demo during the E3 showcase. There's quite a few of those all over the world, and all of them have been created for us by various Mexican artists. We've worked with Mexican musicians, so we've got some original compositions by Mexican artists on the soundtrack. We've also licensed some existing Mexican music as well so that each of the radio stations has some Mexican music on there to give it a really strong flavor. And finally, we've worked with Mexican scriptwriters and Mexican voice actors so that we can be sure that all of our Mexican characters don't sound stereotyped and sound really authentic.
