It all started, as so many things do, with a thread on Reddit. John McCormack is a proper car nut. He’s also an IT expert at Belfast City Council— that’s Belfast in Northern Ireland, not the one in Maine. Or Pennsylvania — but you can tell straight away upon meeting him that he truly loves his cars. How so? Because aside from the original Mk1 pop-up headlights Mazda Miata that he owns, his daily driver (actually technically his wife’s car) is a Ford Focus ST, complete with a manual gearbox.
“We had a Mini John Cooper Works for a while, but never really gelled with it” McCormack tells me when I meet him near Lisburn, just outside Belfast. “We only kept it for a year, and then switched to the ST.” Part of the reason for defecting to Ford was a legacy discount, thanks to McCormack’s father having worked for Ford many years ago, which turned the Focus ST into an unmissable bargain.
Quite apart from a tempting finance deal, it’s clear that McCormack loves the car, enough so that he felt sufficiently moved to post about it on Reddit. And that’s when the message popped up…
“It just said ‘Hi, I like your ST. Do you mind if I photograph it for Forza?” said McCormack. Needless to say, initially it just seemed like a scam of some sort.
But it wasn’t. It was really the team behind Forza Horizon 5, looking to put his car in the game. Believe it or not, this is — sometimes — how major developers find the cars they need to convert from solid chunks of metal, plastic, and rubber into a gaggle of ones and zeros that make up the digital, playable version for your enjoyment. And on August 15 of this year, an update finally brought McCormack’s Focus ST into the mega-hit racing game.
But questions remain. The biggest of them all being ‘why is a major games developer contacting a guy in Northern Ireland about his Focus when Ford has, like, a jillion of them?’ Why did Forza, Turn 10, Microsoft, whoever, not simply ask Ford for the loan of a car? This is after all a video game that features meticulously recreated Ferraris, Bugattis, Porsches, McLarens, and Paganis. Surely digitizing a humble, if fast, Ford Focus ST would be the work of an afternoon?
Well, aside from the fact that the current version of the Focus — recently facelifted with new lights and grille at the front and an updated interior — isn’t sold in the US, Turn 10 was running up against a problem. Ford just wasn’t interested. According to McCormack, the car maker felt that there was little point to going to any effort to immortalize the Focus ST in Forza when the car will be going out of production in 2025. Which meant that Turn 10 had to instead scour the world to find a privately-owned one that would work. Hence the Reddit reach-out.
According to John Wendl, a founder of Turn 10 — which is the company that develops Forza for Xbox — and is the company’s general manager for franchise content: “Each method of acquiring a reference for a car has different advantages and disadvantages. Scanning is nice because we know it’s correct. We know that the shape is accurate, and the manufacturer that we have to approve it with knows that the shape is accurate.”
True digital scanning means laying a carefully placed grid of reflective tape across a car’s surfaces, taking in every curve, line, and surface change. That wasn’t possible for McCormack’s Focus ST, so instead Turn 10 had to rely on the photos. “Some of the other ways that we capture data for the cars is to take photos” confirms Wendl. “We shoot photographs for two different reasons: One is for texture source, but we also have to rebuild the shape. In the cases where we can’t scan the car, we have to recreate the 3D shape of the car from photos. So you take the photos from lots of different angles, and then we lay these photos in behind the geometry of the cars as we’re building them. So we can actually match that geometry to the photo while the artist is working on the car. And then we can match that to multiple photographic views to ensure that it’s all correct. And then the shape is sub-centimeter accurate to the surface of the real car.”
The detail that’s gone into to create a gaming car is immense, from the way the instruments react to the warning lights and, of course, the sound. Turn 10 doesn’t just record the exhaust note, it actually takes a car, and puts it on a rolling road so that it can get the sound of the engine as it’s under load, running up and down through the gears, accelerating and braking. Multiple microphones are aimed at different points of each car to pick up the nuances of the sounds it makes.
Meanwhile, back in Belfast, McCormack was starting to believe that this wasn’t just a Reddit fairy story. “I did ignore it” confirms McCormack. “I ignored it for a week, but the guy kept contacting me and saying that he really did work for Turn 10. He said that the car’s not sold in America, and they travel all over the world to source cars, and he asked for my phone number.”
At which point, McCormack started to think that inquiring about taking photos of someone’s car, especially when those photos already exist on the internet, is a pretty odd way to scam someone. So he passed on his phone number, and a few days later got a call from a Seattle-based number. This was Colin, one of the army of photographers and videographers who travel the world seeking out cars to convert from reality to digital plaything for gamers.
“A couple of months later, Colin comes over to Northern Ireland, as part of a trip all around Europe to find and photograph other cars” said McCormack. “He tells me that the car has to sit still for between five and six hours, and that he needs somewhere, preferably indoors, where there’s a six-meter clearance all around the car. That was a tough one — I helped to find the location, and it wasn’t easy. I tried a local Ford dealer, but they said no as their insurance wouldn’t cover it. Finally I found someone, a car detailing specialist, who is a friend of a friend, and we could use his place for five hours.”
For all those thinking that the video game industry, especially the bit that makes high-end motorsports and racing games, is somehow glamorous, please note that Colin the photographer from Seattle stayed in a cheap hotel near Belfast International Airport, and arrived at the photo shoot driving a rented Vauxhall Corsa. While the Turn 10 team has scanned and digitized Bugatti Veyrons, the Focus was going to be shot in a drafty shed in the County Antrim countryside.
“He’s done museums, he’s done millionaire’s houses, and now he’s in a shed in Conleth” said McCormack. “So I drove out there and sat for five hours. And I had no lunch, I was starving. I hadn’t realised that I’d just be sat there for the full time. Then he was finished and on a flight to Holland and another car. He told me it would take a year — six months to render the car alone. And at that time they hadn’t even received a licence from Ford to use the car, but they were taking the photos just to be ready.”
Even harder than securing a license for a car is finding older high-performance models which haven’t been modified with extra spoilers nor bodykits. S13 and S14 Nissan Silvias and 200SXs are apparently the hardest to find in original factory condition. It’s yet another reason why Turn 10 picked McCormack’s car — it’s one of the dwindling number of Focus STs that haven’t been modified in some way from factory standard.
Sadly, although the update has been released and tens of thousands of gamers are enjoying John McCormack’s perfect stock ST, he’s not one of them, at least not yet. “I do have an Xbox” he said. “But I haven’t unlocked the car in the game yet. You don’t get paid for doing this, incidentally. I didn’t even get any petrol money. The only thing they offer you is your name in the game’s credits, but I got them to put my son’s name in instead because that was just the decent thing to do.”
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