The open-world racing series returns with a much-requested destination
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Microsoft has revealed that the next Forza Horizon game will finally be taking the series’ open-world racing festival to a much-anticipated destination — Japan — in Forza Horizon 6, due in 2026.
The announcement was made during Xbox’s Tokyo Game Show 2025 broadcast via a brief teaser trailer. In the trailer, the camera pans past license plates and souvenirs from previous Forza Horizon locations before resting on a vista showing Mount Fuji across a lake, framed by cherry blossom.
No gameplay details were revealed, and we’ll have to wait a while to learn more. On the broadcast, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty said, “We can’t wait to share more next year.”
A big draw of the Forza Horizon games is the virtual tourism of real-world destinations they offer on their artfully compressed maps. Fans have wishfully assumed the series’ next location would be Japan ever since 2012’s original Forza Horizon, which was set in the U.S. state of Colorado. But Playground Games has consistently defied fans’ expectations, taking the roving festival to the Mediterranean coast of Italy and France, then to Australia, then to the developer’s native Britain, and most recently to Mexico in 2021’s Forza Horizon 5.
The five-year gap between the releases of that game and Forza Horizon 6 will be by far the longest in the series’ history; Playground has been busy with its long-gestating reboot of Fable, also due next year. But the series’ popularity has continued to grow in that time, and the recent PlayStation 5 version of Forza Horizon 5 is one of the best-selling PS5 games this year. Not bad for a series that started as a spinoff of the Forza Motorsport circuit-racing games. Motorsport developer Turn 10 was gutted in a recent round of layoffs, and is now believed to be working mostly as a support studio on Forza Horizon.
So there was little doubt that the 2026 Forza game, teased by Phil Spencer at the Xbox Games Showcase in June, would be a new Horizon. But fans now finally have confirmation that it’s coming — and heading where they most wanted it to.
