I haven’t played Forza Horizon 6 yet, and odds are, neither have you. It doesn’t drop until May 19, and only a few people—like my amigo Adam—got an advance copy, for review purposes (read ours here). He and I were talking about the game, and he mentioned a mission that sounded incredibly familiar. Somehow, it hit me with a wave of nostalgia. Then I realized: It’s like my favorite side quests from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, but with cars.
See, in Forza Horizon 6, automotive photographer Larry Chen pops up more than once. He’s a quest-giving character who tasks you with driving missions, so that he can snag some killer shots of stellar cars in iconic Japanese locations. In one mission, called “Shutter Speed,” you have to hit 90 mph in a Mugen-tuned Honda CRX while driving on a bridge near Daikoku Parking Area. The whole idea is to capture motion for a fictional car magazine.
If you played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 like I did (obsessively), then maybe this rings a bell for you. That game featured missions where you talked to iconic skate photographer Atiba Jefferson, who has shot for Transworld, Thrasher, and the like. He tasked you with tricks to hit so he could snag some killer shots of stellar flips and grinds in iconic locations like Alcatraz. Catching my drift yet?
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (PS2) – Alcatraz: Goals
I was immediately caught up in this. It had to be deliberate! Someone at Forza had to know! And then I thought, “I’ll just ask Larry.”
So, that’s what I did. I reached out to Larry Chen, acknowledging that my question for him was incredibly niche and maybe even a little obscure. His response was everything I’d hoped for and more.
“I absolutely love this question because I’m actually really good friends with Atiba Jefferson,” Chen wrote in an email. “We’re both Canon Explorers of Light. I’m the only automotive and motorsports photographer in the group, and he’s the skate photographer, so it was pretty natural for us to become close over the years through Canon events and camera launches. We even got inducted into this exclusive group on the same day.”
“I’m very aware of his role in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, and when I told him I was going to be in Forza Horizon 6 he actually told me a bunch of stories about his experience working on Tony Hawk.”
See! I knew they had to be connected!
“The funniest story was that he apparently recorded all of his voice lines for the game, but the studio ended up deciding his real voice did not fit the character, so they replaced all of his lines with a voice actor,” Chen recalled. This is somewhat well-known, and they even talk about it some in Vice‘s awesome documentary on Jefferson. “Obviously that sucks,” Chen continued, “but after all these years it’s become one of those funny stories we laugh about together.”
“It’s honestly pretty cool that both of us kind of had this similar rite of passage in our own worlds. Him through skate culture and Tony Hawk, and me through car culture and Forza. The Canon connection between us makes us the dream team I guess, haha.”
Chen told me that becoming a video game character was a real “pinch me moment.”
“I was standing there surrounded by all these Canon cameras while they were scanning my body, my face, even my teeth. It just felt surreal. To become a character in Forza Horizon 6, which may very well be the biggest and most important car racing game of our generation, is something I never could have imagined growing up.”
Personally, I don’t think I’ll ever be a character in Forza Horizon (or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, for that matter). But crazier things have happened. I’m not giving up hope just yet.
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