SBJ Gaming: Mobil 1 races into Forza with Tony Stewart, Jamie Chadwick

Mobil 1 unveiled a different sort of activation today, tapping Tony Stewart (a three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion who has also run IndyCar and NHRA ) and Indy NXT racer Jamie Chadwick (a three-time champion of the Formula Regional W-series) for its most extensive promotion for Forza Motorsport, Microsoft’s 2023 reboot of its long-lived and well-regarded sim racing series.

In the activation, players will compete against the times Chadwick and Stewart set for a course designed for Mobil 1, the 4.81km Maple Valley, in Legend vs. Leaderboard Rival Events. Mobil 1 plans to announce other racers taking part in what it terms as its largest video game activation to date. The Stewart portion of the event is live and runs through Aug. 7. Chadwick’s is Aug. 29-Sept. 11, and other drivers will pick up from here until the promotion ends Dec. 11.

Stewart is no stranger to Mobil 1 activations. The brand has been one of his sponsors since 2009, and promotions with the company have put Stewart behind the wheel of Lewis Hamilton’s F1 car, an armored truck and ... driving over cars with an WWII-era M36 tank destroyer.

“All the commercial spots we always did with them, they always made them very comical, which resonated with the race fans. ... This was a cool promotion. It's awesome,” Stewart said. “Driving simulators are massive and huge these days. So for Mobil 1 to get in this space finally and to do a promotion where you're going to bring some professional racers in and try to lay down a lap time and then know that there's going to be hundreds of thousands of race fans, and I jokingly said, ‘in the first 5 minutes of this, there's going to be some 8-year-old kid or 5-year-old kid that's going to go out there and beat my time, and it's going to frustrate the daylights out of me. But it was so much fun to do this.”

Forza stands out from other racing sims with its variety of cars, and Stewart took advantage of this. He picked a beast, a 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 302, and noted his time -- 1:57.453 -- is “very respectable” and hopes that he is “in the upper 10%” of times when the event is over.

As for why he picked the Mustang, Stewart said, “We've had a longstanding partnership with Ford, so it was important for us to pick a Ford, and I like the Mustang. The fun part about: It's not easy to drive, and that's what we wanted. I didn't want something that was going to be easy for everybody to run. I wanted something that you were going to have to manhandle it, that you were going to have to finesse. And that's what this Ford does.”

Getting started

This is Chadwick’s first promotion with Mobil 1, “which has been a lot of fun and cool to engage with one of their many very cool sponsorship activations,” she said. “They've been involved in so many different road sports sponsorships over the years, so it’s been a relationship that I've had for a while now, in terms of speaking with them.”

She went with another American classic, a 1970 Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1, and recorded a time of 1:54.859. “[It] was bit of an old beast to drive round around the track, but when choosing or picking a car, firstly I wanted something that people might struggle with to beat me with. So, there's a bit of tactical decision in it, but also, it's a car that I probably won't have the chance to drive on the road, so it's cool to get that chance to drive it in the game.” Chadwick also noted that the car “wanted to go sideways” a lot.

Chadwick also enjoyed the track, which Forza’s Turn 10 Studios designed for this promotion. “It kind of reminds me of a lot of the tracks that we have over in the States, which is quite fun,” she said. “Kind of blind corners, undulations, through the forest in beautiful locations. So that was a lot of fun to learn a track like this and a track I would love to exist in real life.”

Now, only if Mobil 1 could set Chadwick up in a tank. “Maybe that's the next thing on the list,” she said with a laugh.

Play by Play’s emergence this week is exciting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s encouraging when a studio debuts in an era of studio closures and mass layoffs. And it’s heartening to see folks working on a sports game that’s reviving a dormant genre (street hoops, in this case) and isn’t trying to be the next big annual series.

“A big part of this is, we’ve taking these two mediums of things we love [sports and video games] and blended them together in a way that's, frankly, not being done anymore in the world of games,” CEO and founder Scott Probst said. “We really want to have players come together and create these memories that stick with them for a lifetime, the same way that the games of our early years of gaming, the Mike Tyson's Punch Outs and Tecmo Bowls and RBI Baseballs stuck with us for years and years and decades.”

Creative Director Mike Young wasn’t even planning on making another sports game. When he left EA Sports in 2021, the former Madden NFL creative director (and former developer for the NBA Street series) wanted to make a big, open-world narrative game.

“When I got the call from Scott, his passion for games like NBA Street and the type of culture and studio he wanted to build made me kind of put that dream on pause. The time I had on NBA Street was seven years, and it was still the best time in my career. I worked with so many talented people, and we had such passion for the game, and we had such pride in what we were doing, and smaller teams and everything Scott talked to me about in our initial calls, I was like, yeah, this is more of a dream of mine than trying some big, crazy non-sports game. I'd rather go back to sports and try to modernize the NBA Street formula and bring it back to this modern audience.”

Contraction has hit the game industry hard over the past two years -- Humble Games developers said the studio laid off its staff, as layoffs and shutdowns still feel like a weekly occurrence -- and the investor crowd has had little appetite for investing in new studios. So Play by Play went the self-funded route, but Probst said the decision had more to do with wanting to stay small and make the game they wanted to make.

“The best path to get there is by going about it on our own in terms of funding. And so, it's been very intentional in terms of how we set up a kind of financial landscape of the company, how we grew the company,” he said.

Like my colleague Ben Portnoy , our college sports reporter, my gaming time has focused on EA Sports College Football 25 (and so have many others, as it's the No. 2-ranked sports game in market researcher Newzoo's Pulse platform, with more than 3 million daily active players on PlayStation 5 and Xbox X/S in 37 countries it measures, excluding China and India). I preferred NCAA College Football to Madden NFL, so I’ve been excited about this one since EA announced it a few years ago.

It should come as no surprise that I’m playing Dynasty mode. So far, I’ve transformed Cal from Pac-12 pushovers into the new terror of the ACC, opening the season with a 7-0 record. As someone who continues to dabble in Madden every year, the gameplay system changes haven’t fazed me as they have poor Ben, but I am noticing a few things that I hope EA addresses with either updates or different approaches for the next iteration of this revived series.

• Recruiting is the best part of Dynasty mode so far. EA Tiburon (the studio that made this game) made some smart decisions here, especially with how you can spend time on activities such as sliding into a prospect’s DMs or getting in touch with their friends and family. My one complaint -- when a recruit has left you out of their top three choices, it would be nice if that player automatically moved out of your prospect list (or into a different one).

• Next year’s version needs more customization options for your coaches’ look. All the faces look Black or white to me -- I don’t see any representation for Latinos or Asians (nor women!). The faces are all set; you can make tweaks or edits, as you can in players modes for EA’s various sports games. I wanted to make a coach who looked more like Oregon State legend Dee Andros (known as “The Great Pumpkin” for his size and orange jacket on the sidelines) and less like a wider version of Rams coach Sean McVay.

• It’s either calling far too few penalties, or I’m playing clean football. I haven’t experienced a false start or offensive holding yet.

My SBJ colleague Juwan Watson is focusing more on the player mode than Dynasty and shared his thoughts. “Right off the bat, with no high school route for your Road to Glory player, you would think playing as Underdog is the way to go … but not at all! EA Sports made it difficult if you choose to play as an Underdog. But the attention to details for the transfer portal, academics, NIL and other interactions between the CPU is fantastic.”

• EA Sports College Football 25 drew over 2.2 million players during its Early Access period, which began July 15 and wrapped up when it released Friday. It also drew another 600,000 during its EA Play trial that also began July 15. One of the in-game sponsors that players saw was Discover, which has logo placements and in-game broadcast spots.

• SMT Games launched its first game, Super Tiny Football, on iOS last week after a soft-launch on June 25. It's a paid game, a rarity these days in mobile, and it seeks to help new players learn the basics of football. It also offers gameplay geared to team-building and career modes.

• Big Ant Studios' tennis game Tiebreak showed off more of what will be in the game when it launches Aug. 22 on Steam and consoles. It'll have more than 120 ATP and WTA pro players, such as Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Coco Gauff, Iga Swiatek, Carlos Alcaraz, Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner. It'll also have a mode that relives Djokovic's career. It's in Early Access now on Steam.

• The PUBG Mobile World Cup's main tournament kicks off this weekend as part of the Esports World Cup in Saudi Arabia. It runs Friday-Sunday, featuring 16 teams and a prize pool for $3 million.

• The U.S. Olympic team and NBC are collaborating with Roblox as part of the “ever-expanding quest to draw in young fans,” per the AP. The companies are collaborating to produce a new “Obby” -- a Roblox obstacle course -- and other features that “include ways to interact with U.S. athletes while also checking out highlights from the Paris Games” and making visits to a virtual Team USA House called “The Vibe House.”

• Sweetens Cove, a golf club near Chattanooga that's co-owned by Peyton Manning and Andy Roddick, is the latest course to drop on the Golf+ game on the Meta Quest VR headset.

• EA "is adding another level of monetization to its flagship football series with a new Premium Tier of in-game rewards in EA Sports FC 25," per GamesIndustry.biz. It unlocks via either money or in-game currency.