Women of XBOX UK – International Women’s Day 2021

Following the first video last October, the Women of Xbox UK group has once again brought together women from across Xbox to discuss their experiences in the games industry. Celebrating International Women’s Day and reflecting this year’s theme of #ChooseToChallenge, this edition of Women of Xbox UK features Louise O’Connor (Everwild Executive Producer, Rare) in…

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Latest news

Playground Student Placements 2020

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Following the success of our first student placements this summer we’re planning ahead for summer 2020. We have four open positions for students to join Playground Games’ engineering department across our Forza and RPG teams. Eligible students should be at university studying towards a degree in Games Programming, Computer Science or similar. The placement would…

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EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!

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Last night our very own Ralph Fulton took to the stage at the Xbox E3 2019 Briefing in LA to announce our newest expansion for Forza Horizon 4, LEGO Speed Champions! This expansion will allow you to explore a LEGO world with changing seasons, numerous challenges and plenty of LEGO Speed ​​Champions cars like the…

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We won!

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It’s official, we’re now a BAFTA award winning studio! On Thursday 4th April 2019 we attended the 2019 BAFTA Game Awards at Southbank in London. Forza Horizon 4 was shortlisted for Best British Game along with Red Dead Redemption 2, The Room: Old Sins, 11-11: Memories Retold, Overcooked 2 and Two Point Hospital. And we…

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Studio Festivities!

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We’ve just held our annual Playground Games Festive Fun Day. In what has become a Playground tradition we dress the studio and invite the team and their families to celebrate the festive season. With the bar set high from last years inflatable grotto, complete with Santa and elves, the Operations Team excelled themselves and setup…

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Gamasutra – Parallax window textures

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Gareth Harwood, Technical Art Director, at Playground recently spoke with Gamasutra about streaming in open-world games, highlighting  parallax textures in Forza Horizon 4. In the article Gareth goes into detail on how he and his team came up with a modular building solution to achieve a smaller memory footprint and how they implemented the parallax…

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The Game Awards 2018

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This year Forza Horizon 4 was nominated in two categories at The Game Awards, best Sports/Racing and best Sound Design. I’m delighted to say that we won the the Sports/Racing Award, which also had nominations for FIFA 19, NBA 2K 19, Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 and Mario Tennis Aces, a tough category! Aaron Greenberg, Head…

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Golden Joystick Awards 2018

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We recently attended the Golden Joystick Awards in London at the Bloomsbury Big Top with the ceremony hosted by Danny Wallace. This year Forza Horizon 4 was nominated in two categories and we were thrilled to win Best Xbox Game! The Golden Joystick Awards have been going since 1983, making it 35 years old and…

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