To the benefit of every racing-game fan in the world, in the early '80s a young boy in England's north east stared at the pixels on the screen of an arcade cabinet and became fixated on discovering how they worked. Today, Gavin Raeburn has as impressive a credits list as anyone in game development might hope to amass, as producer on seminal Codemasters titles such as TOCA and Colin McRae, and as studio head and game director on the Forza Horizon series from its point of origin to the juggernaut Horizon 5 in 2021.
Having left Codemasters in 2010 to co-found Playground Games, Raeburn has recently embarked on that same high-risk move again, leaving the Forza maker to form Lighthouse Games. Launching the new venture, he said that "all the best people I've worked with at Codemasters and Playground" were joining him, likening it to "taking the best singers from the best boy bands in the world".
