The Best of Forza Motorsport 2 Community: Photomode
Professional and amateur photographers take to the track. Here is their gorgeous portfolio...
By: Che Chou
Rival Rides taken by Sphilli22
Welcome to the first anniversary celebration of Forza Motorsport 2, the complete racing simulation on Xbox 360. Here's the short intro on this whole anniversary occasion, and it's really pretty simple. We here at Turn 10 (developers of the Forza franchise) felt that, with the arrival of May 2008, we've hit an important milestone in our studio's short but eventful history: the one year birthday of Forza 2 and its release into the wild. Since its debut, Forza 2 has run an incredible race, winning its place on the podium in the hearts of racing fans and Xbox 360 gamers everywhere. But beyond just speed, Forza 2 has turned the racing genre on its head by raising the bar on user-generated content (aka UGC for those in the games biz) and online community features. One such feature is Forza 2's immensely popular photomode, where players can snap pictures of their rides in any of the game's modes, including single and multiplayer replays and the paintshop. Once created, users have the option of uploading their photos to this website to use as they please.
When Forza 2 launched back in May 2007, we at Turn 10 used photomode as a tool to show off our game. With the deluge of screenshot requests from game magazines and websites, it was a godsend for our art staff who could basically hand off the PR task to me (I didn't have a community "team" back in the day!). After the game reached the hands of consumers, we began to see the earliest photomode efforts from the community. Although most folks a year ago were still grappling with the intricacies of getting pictures to look as clean and realistic as they could in Forza 2 via the in-game slider controls, I was already starting to see some amazing photos in one of the earliest post-release pitpass reports. In fact, if you check out the aforementioned link, you'll see familiar names like Sphilli22 and TGhost who have been cranking out amazing shots for an entire year.
The photomode community blazed trails quickly in the early days too. One of the first community calls-to-action was a weekly photomode competition where we awarded unicorn cars to those who posted the best pictures each week. The judging is, as always, subjective, but we generally looked for creative compositions, inspired lighting and contrast, and as always, style and theme. And it became agonizing each week to narrow down the winners of the photomode competitions. The level of quality there was consistently mindblowing. As the weeks went on, we handed the competitions and organization of them to the community VIPs in the photomode scene itself, while other Forza fan sites like Forzacentral.com began to host their own as well.
Sexy Silverstone taken by teepo
To this day, Forza 2's photomode servers report very healthy activity stats, and if you wander over to their part of town on Forzamotorsport.net, you'll see amazing images week after week. To give you an idea of what our favorite photos taken in the last year, we've gathered a handful here to represent a very impressive collective. Enjoy.
// Next: A gallery of the best Forza 2 photos 2007 - 2008! //