To the fine folks at Turn 10,
I picked up Forza Horizon 3 after my wife became pregnant because I needed a quick pick-up-put-down, clean, nonviolent game. I became addicted to it, so too did she, and our baby was born last summer with a particular affinity for Fitz and the Tantrums' "Handclap" and other songs that play on Horizon Pulse. Since then we've acquired the DLCs, Forza Horizon 4, its DLCs, and I've started to actually make an impression as an in game artist, with over 1,000 downloads! (Which probably isn't really all that much, but it's still more success than I've had self-publishing fiction novels on Amazon KDP, so I take my victories where I can.)
We have talked a couple of times about good locales for future Horizon games. An obvious choice, of course, is Japan, but I would venture another choice: Eastern Tennessee.
We live in Oak Ridge, TN, a small town northwest of Knoxville. Oak Ridge, "The Secret City," was created by the U.S. military in the early forties as part of the Manhattan Project, and continues to host Oak Ridge National Labs. ORNL is involved in a wide range of engineering projects, and is fond of demonstrating new technologies through automotive exhibitionism. In particular, they've taken to 3D printing cars, including reproducing a complete Shelby Cobra. Local Motors also has a factory on the edge of town.
The neat thing is, depending on the map size, you could range between the thickly forested areas north of Oak Ridge to the Smoky Mountains southeast of Knoxville, with Knoxville sitting between them to provide some urban street racing environments. With Nashville down the highway west of Knoxville and Bristol down the highway east of us, racing and music are big parts of the local culture - a great fit for a Horizon Festival. The area also provides pretense for some neat gimmicks to keep things fresh - a country or southern rock radio station, developing and testing cars with experimental technology (especially alternative/sustainable energy), story missions that dive into Oak Ridge's history with vintage cars and military vehicles, off road races that tread in mildly radioactive restricted areas, and - of course - monster trucks, demolition derbies, stunt shows, and all sorts of other less civilized motorsports popular in the American Southeast and Midwest.
The reason I felt compelled to write this is because of a story reported by Oak Ridge's local newspaper this morning; for essentially the same reasons I mentioned above, the city is talking about sponsoring the construction of an actual real-life motorsports park that would provide test tracks for the lab, and entertainment for racing fans. And here's the kicker - they're wanting to build it at Oak Ridge's Horizon Center along with an amphitheater for shows and such. So, hypothetically, how awesome would it be to sponsor a real-life Horizon Festival to tie into the release of a future game? Personally, I think it would be pretty cool.
Anyway, just an idea. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Thanks for making great video games that have kept us sane through the first six months of parenthood,
Best,
James McDonald
(aka, "Caelus Prime")
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