The Big Star Wars: Galactic Racer Interview — Why It's Not Open World, How Its Story Mode Works, and When It's Set

The Big Star Wars: Galactic Racer Interview — Why It's Not Open World, How Its Story Mode Works, and When It's Set Southeast Asia Home Amazon Deals Pro-tips by Codashop PC PS4 Xbox One Nintendo Mobile Entertainment EsportsMoreSearch Home More About IGN SEAContactAdvertisePressUser AgreementPrivacy PolicyCookie PolicyRSSIGN Southeast Asia is operated under license by Media Prima Digital Sdn Bhd (199901014126) Change Region United States United Kingdom Australia Africa Adria Serbian/Croatian Adria Slovenian Benelux / Dutch Brazil China / 中国 Czechia / Slovakia France Germany Greece / Ελλάδα Hungary India Israel Italy / Italia Japan / 日本 Korea / 한국 Latin America Middle East – English Middle East – الأوسطالشرق Nordic Poland Portugal Southeast Asia Spain / España Turkey / Türkiye world.ign.com Register / Login Register / Login Login Register Star Wars: Galactic Racer The Big Star Wars: Galactic Racer Interview — Why It's Not Open World, How Its Story Mode Works, and When It's Set Now that really is podracing. This post might contain affiliation links. If you buy something through this post, the publisher may get a share of the sale. By Tom Phillips  Updated: Feb. 16, 2026, 10:18 p.m. Related reads:MapleStorySEA Celebrates 20th Anniversary With Massive Summer Updates Following last week’s Star Wars: Galactic Racer gameplay trailer reveal, I sat down with the game’s makers for an in-depth chat revealing its new systems and story mode, and a proper discussion on why this marks the triumphant return of track-based racing, after so many open world games.More like thisOpen Back Headphones: A Sound Experience Like No OtherGalactic Racer is the first project from British studio Fuse Games, which was founded in 2023 by a core of former colleagues from Criterion, the beloved band behind Burnout and later Need for Speed titles, before it got gobbled up to become part of Battlefield Studios. Now, as Fuse Games’ team races towards a galaxy far, far away, I caught up with its CEO and founder Matt Webster, plus creative director Kieran Crimmins, for an intriguing chat on what’s to come.Obviously you’ve been announced for a little while now, but I’ve been looking forward to seeing more from the moment Fuse Games was announced, considering your long heritage at Criterion. And the game looks great, from what I’ve seen of it.Matt Webster: Was it along the lines of what you imagined? Well, I remember you did that GI interview and you were sort of hedging your bets on what genre of game you were going to be working on… And I was like, ‘they’re clearly making a racing game, I don’t even know why they’re pretending.’Kieran Crimmins: [Laughs] We’ve made spaceship stuff before, so that was possible. It’s not [what we’re making] but possible. Who were we kidding!Maybe you were working on another Battlefield game! But probably not. Crimmins: [Laughs] Yeah, fair enough. I had lots of questions about what kind of racer you guys were planning to make — open world or not, and we’ll get onto that. But when you made that announcement about first setting up, did you have an outline of what you wanted to do? What was that journey like from leaving Criterion to the announcement of Star Wars? Webster: We thought we were going really fast, but we’re three years old now. Crimmins: That’s crazy isn’t it, you’ve made whole games in that time before. [But] we’ve never set up studios in that time. Webster: That is true. Where this comes from is, first of all, a shared love of racing and a shared love of Star Wars. But when there’s a new studio, new team, new tech, new creative… every time there’s new, you’ve got an element of risk. So when we’re thinking about it at studio level going, ‘well, okay, well how do you mitigate some of those risks?’ We can mitigate tech risk by using Unreal or technologies that exist. We can mitigate people risk by working with some folks that we already know and we can mitigate some creative risk by playing in some things that we already know. So I guess it’s a mixture of those two, but the more you think about it, you then say, ‘okay, why hasn’t there been a Star Wars racing game for so long?'”We always play to our strengths…”Crimmins: Yeah, I mean obviously we kicked around a bunch of concepts because that’s good game making. You want to think about what you’re doing. We always play to our strengths. We’ve got a certain sensibilities of how we like to make games. I’m sure if you’ve played any of what we’ve worked on that DNA is going to be present here, as it is in everything we do. And that’s one of the things that the studio is based, that mutual understanding and long history of shared love for certain types of mechanics and experiences around thrilling, fast arcade racing games. [And then there was that] shared love for the Star Wars universe… we were like, ‘oh my gosh, imagine all the things that we love but actually transferred into there as well as the heritage of the movies with podracing or all the racing experiences in there. Anyway, when you put that together, it was fairly obvious that was probably going to be the best game we could make for our first game. It would just be the best game that we could make full stop. And then we took that to our partners in Lucasfilm, because we worked with them before, we know them, so we could say, ‘Hey guys, what do you think of this thing?’ And they basically said the same thing back to us where they were like, ‘yeah, we are really excited about this stuff. We love that stuff that you doing. That absolutely makes sense for us.’ And as soon as you have that kind of mutual excitement, it’s like, we’ve got to make this happen. It sounds like there was a sort of mutual appreciation there from Lucasfilm. Webster: Well, we’ve got a shared history. I think our first [time on Star Wars was] when we were at Criterion, I remember the folks at DICE were like, ‘we think it’s an impossible mission, but if anyone can do it, you can,’ and it was speeder bikes through Endor, just that fantasy. We’ve all got it in our heads. And so we just approached that as we would do delivering on any fantasies. Our previous fantasies used to be sports car fantasies. Well, the best way around the corner for me was always all four wheels smoking and sideways with a big smile on your face. We work on those levels, and as Kieran was saying earlier, there’s that shared appreciation of the type of experience we want to do, but that history just means something. And then through to the [Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One] X-Wing VR mission [a free VR add-on to Star Wars Battlefront], which was one of our most favorite things to do and was really wonderful. There’s clearly an appreciation of the work and that goes a long way. So I think there’s the meeting of those two things together, people with an understanding of how both sides work, a mutual respect of one another and a desire to go and execute o