The Toyota GR GT Lands in Forza Horizon 6 and Your First Drive Is Against a Bullet Train

The wildly popular Forza Horizon racing game franchise is a mirror that reflects the automotive zeitgeist as much as it serves as a playground for enthusiasts to explore their love for cars in a wide-open sandbox. So intertwined are the real and virtual car communities that it isn’t uncommon to hear younger enthusiasts say that an area with a lot of supercars is “like a Forza lobby.”

Forza Horizon players have already explored settings such as Colorado, Southern Europe, Australia, Great Britain, and Mexico in previous installments of the franchise. Now gamers will have their chance to explore an epicenter of global car culture, Japan, in Forza Horizon 6. It’ll also be their first chance to drive the Toyota GR GT, one of the most hotly anticipated sports cars of the moment. We sat down with Playground Games’ Torben Ellert, the design director for Forza Horizon 6, and Takashi Doi, the GR GT’s chief project manager, at the same time to find out what players can expect while driving Toyota’s new grand tourer on and off Japan’s digital roads.

First Impressions of the GR GT

When we asked Ellert and Doi-san what to expect from the Toyota GR GT in Forza Horizon 6, Ellert took the lead. “Understanding the technical nature of the GR GT prototype, where the engine is placed relative to the center of mass, the fact that it’s very slightly back-weighted means that we know that within our simulation the acceleration should perform in a particular way,” he said. Expect the GR GT to have this front-mid-engine character when you pick up your controller and for that sensation to mimic its real-world driving dynamics.

Ellert stressed that communicating the Toyota’s personality was as important as simulating the actual car’s behavior, and that the feel of the GR GT’s hybridized twin-turbocharged V-8 powertrain should come through in the game’s programming. “It’s not just a blind number simulator,” Ellert said. “It’s about taking the soul of the car and finding a way to express that in a way that’s respectful and authentic in our game.”

Doi-san spoke up next, emphasizing the importance of the driver-first philosophy that went into the GR GT’s development. “The most important thing is how each driver feels once they get in and drive the car,” he said. “That applies to both the game and the real car.”

To attain a high level of accuracy, Toyota provided more the Playground Games team with more access than it typically would for non-employees. “We had this absolutely unique opportunity to go behind the scenes with a vehicle in development, see pre-production models and really internalize everything about it from what it sounds like when you start it to what it sounds like when you take it around a track,” Ellert said.

While neither Ellert nor Doi-san could give us any insight as to how the car was rendered for Forza Horizon 6, Ellert was able to describe the sound recording process in detail, which is “very much led by the vehicle itself.”

“It’s taping microphones to every imaginable surface. It’s putting microphones inside the car on the floor under the seat, taping it up on the dash, and then starting it and driving it. It’s about putting microphones along the track side and passing them so that we know what you should hear if someone else drives the GR GT past you,” Ellert said.

Players won’t have to wait to drive the Toyota GR GT for very long after firing up Forza Horizon 6 for the first time. Ellert told us that will happen during the first 10 minutes of the game. “It’s an absolute pinnacle experience of what it means to be part of the Horizon Festival, he said, alluding to the franchise’s Coachella-like theming.

“You see tōge roads, you race alongside the Shinkansen [bullet train], you get to drive the GR GT across our highlands biome with Suzuki grass stretching in all directions,” Ellert said. “You see Tokyo against the Pacific, that almost euphoric high delivered through the absolutely incredible GR GT.”

Insights from Toyota

More than just a paid partnership, the relationship between Playground Games and Toyota was two-way street throughout the development of Forza Horizon 6. Ellert stressed that his team received feedback from Toyota if something about the GR GT wasn’t true to life.

“I recall a conversation that was very much about the Albedo reflectiveness [the fraction of sunlight that is diffusely reflected by a body] within the headlight housings, which seems like a tiny detail, but detail is important,” Ellert said. Toyota’s team scrutinized the movement of the vehicle during cornering and provided feedback on what would seem like a microscopic detail to an outsider.

The same consideration was extended to sound design. “Sound was another element where we provide footage and resources and material to Doi-San and his team to review and give us the very specific stringent feedback on exactly how something should look or feel or sound,” Ellert said.

Doi-san let us know that Toyota focused its testing efforts on a mix of city streets, curvy public roads, in-house test courses, and racetracks. However, there are certain areas where the Playground Games team had to improvise. Much of the driving in a Forza Horizon title occurs off the pavement as you barrel through fields and wide-open spaces. “To be honest, we haven’t taken the car full blast on a dirt road,” Doi-san said. “But we’ve tested the car on similar types of surfaces that re-create that kind of movement.”

Seeing as the GR GT is still in the prototype stage of its development, Doi-san reminded us that Toyota still has work to do as it puts the finishing touches on its performance flagship. At least we’ll be able to bide our time driving the GR GT virtually.

What Other Cars Appear in Forza Horizon 6 and When Does it Arrive?

The Toyota GR GT won’t be alone on the cover of Forza Horizon 6. The new sports car appears opposite the current-generation Toyota Land Cruiser, which has proven off-road capability as we’ve demonstrated by taking it to the ends of the earth. Other cars that appear in the images provided by Playground Games include enthusiast favorites such as the R35 Nissan GT-R, multiple generations of the Toyota Supra, past and present variants of the Porsche 911, and the Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato among many others. We asked if the GR GT3 and second-generation Lexus LFA will also be available, but neither party from Toyota nor Playground Games would comment on the matter.

You won’t have to wait much longer to get behind the digital wheel of the Toyota GR GT. Forza Horizon 6 arrives on May 19, 2026 for the Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Steam. It’ll also be available for the PlayStation 5 later this year.

Based on the public’s fervor following the Toyota GR GT’s debut, Forza Horizon 6 once again seems like it will marry the passions of car enthusiasts with the latest advancements in the real world of high-performance vehicles. Until it’s possible to drive the GR GT on the actual Hakone tōge, we suspect we’ll be quite happy driving Toyota’s supercar throughout Forza’s rendition of Japan.