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Gavin Raeburn, studio director of Playground Games, is leaving the Forza Horizon 5 studio he helped found in 2009.
The news was broken by Windows Central, who got a quote from Microsoft’s CVP of Forza and Fable Alan Hartman. “After 12 years working on five award-winning Forza Horizon games, Gavin Raeburn is leaving Playground Games as Studio Director. A founding member of Playground Games, we thank Gav for his leadership and contributions to the Forza franchise and wish him all the best.”
Raeburn had a fairly notable career even before he founded Playground. He worked as a producer and designer on a number of racing titles at Codemasters, including TOCA Race Driver 3, the original DiRT and Race Driver: GRID. Raeburn would then form Playground Games in 2009. The company announced their first game, the first Forza Horizon in 2012. Playground Games was then formally snapped up by Microsoft by the reveal of 2018’s Forza Horizon 4.
One of the company’s other co-founders, Trevor Williams will take over the reins as Studio Head following Raeburn’s departure. The announcement concludes by saying the developer will continue to focus on updates to Forza Horizon 5 and Fable. It was announced that Playground are working on the latter back in the summer of 2020. They’d been rumoured to be taking on the project for some time, especially after opening a second studio in 2017.
The studio’s latest game, Forza Horizon 5, has done very well for itself since launching on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC last year. You can check out our review right over here.
