Stuntman: Hollywood feels like a tour of the past in more ways than one – it’s a resurrected gaming IP loaded with film brands from our childhood, from Miami Vice to Back to the Future. But can it be more than an exercise in branding nostalgia?
I’ll get to that later, but first, let’s recap: Those old enough to have been gaming since 2002 may recall the original Stuntman, developed by Newcastle-based Reflections and published by the long-defunct French outfit Infogrames. It showed that a video game could provide the perfect consequence-free environment to indulge one’s fantasies as a Hollywood stunt driver, and it spawned a 2007 sequel titled Stuntman: Ignition.
All good, throwaway fun, but perhaps not the most obvious candidate for a franchise reboot. Nevertheless, Saber Interactive is in the process of bringing back Stuntman, in the form of Stuntman: Hollywood, which will be released at an as-yet-unspecified date in 2027.
Stuntman: Hollywood has an interesting provenance. According to Saber Interactive Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits, whom I interviewed at Gamescom, its origins date back to a period which the company probably wouldn’t recall as the best of times – when it was owned by the notoriously over-expansive Embracer Group, which bought Saber Interactive in 2020, then sold it in 2024 for $247 million, to a company owned by Saber co-founder Matthew Karch.
But there was another factor in play: Saber Interactive’s relationship with film company Universal Pictures. Willits explains: “Stuntman was an IP that Embracer owned, so when we were in the Embracer family, we were like, ‘Hey, we love driving games.’ The team that we had, which was coming available, had experience in that driving genre, and we had a great relationship with Universal because we have Jurassic Park and Turok, and Universal was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this’.”
Back to the Future and Jurassic World? Marketing genius
Obviously, any gamer who wants to pursue a vicarious virtual career as a stunt driver would want to do it on the sets of the biggest, most blockbusting films. Willits adds: “So we were able to get The Fast and the Furious, Knight Rider, Miami Vice, Back to the Future and Jurassic World for it. And the movie people were really excited – they gave us ideas, and they even helped us with some assets and stuff. It’s been a dream to work with Universal on this.”
One of Saber Interactive’s biggest assets is turning out to be its cultivation of strong relationships with the movie industry – which would seem an obvious route for a video games publisher to pursue, since movie IPs form a fantastic basis for successful games. But strangely few game publishers schmooze the movie world as assiduously as Saber Interactive.
Willits points out that his company has also been working with Lionsgate, as it is in the early stages of creating a John Wick game: “Working with Lionsgate has been great; working with Keanu and Chad Stahelski directly is amazing – those guys are so awesome. Chad, the director, is a big video game fan, and if you watch a John Wick movie, it kind of feels like a video game.”
Hands-on with Stuntman: Hollywood
Willits describes Stuntman: Hollywood as “Bite-sized awesomeness,” and based on my hands-on experience with the Gamescom demo, that description is accurate. The Gamescom demo featured five stunt-driving runs, each ending with a gloriously over-the-top stunt, such as launching a Ferrari Testarossa onto the back of a speeding super-yacht. Each of the five runs in the demo was short – between five and ten minutes – but intense. Throughout, I had a director in my ear, telling me what to do and praising my better efforts. I also had a line showing my ideal route, along with other indicators, such as proximity, when I had been told to get as close as possible to an object without hitting it.
I inevitably made mistakes, but Stuntman: Hollywood proved relatively forgiving, allowing a certain number of howlers per run. On one run, I got things so horribly wrong (basically getting confused about which route I was supposed to take) that I had to retry the run. At the end of each run, I was given a rating, which in a proper playthrough of the game (as opposed to a time-limited demo) would have added replay value as I sought stunt-driving perfection.
I had to perform various tasks in each run, including drifting at prescribed points, generating sufficient speed to make jumps, passing as close as possible to objects and cars without hitting them, actually hitting objects (causing a satisfying amount of designed on-set mayhem), weaving at specific points to avoid explosions and following a tight route on occasions. There were often plenty of those movie car-chase staples – piles of cardboard boxes – to decoratively scatter. And every run built up to a satisfying crescendo, with a long, speed-building precision section before perfectly timing a bravura jump.
Stuntman: Hollywood, commendably, didn’t shout in a cheesy manner about what film I happened to be on the set of, but it was pretty obvious. The car I drove in each run provided a clue: a white Ferrari Testarossa for a Miami Vice sequence, an off-road motorbike in Jurassic World, the inimitable KITT in Knight Rider, and a pumped-up Toyota designed for drifting in The Fast and the Furious. The game also includes the DeLorean from Back to the Future and a fearsome reinforced muscle car from Death Race, another movie IP that features in the game.
Handling was pretty much what I’d expect from each machine, though you could press a bumper to induce drifting. All the cars had plenty of power on offer (it was a shame I didn’t get to drive the Back to the Future DeLorean, which was famously a pig to drive in real life, though I suspect it would have got a power boost in the game).
Film stunts brought to life
Graphically, Stuntman: Hollywood was pretty impressive, with the high-resolution detail typical of modern driving games. The game avoided the trap of obsessive realism, with a slightly cartoony look to some of the objects I drove through and around, and individual art direction for each run that took cues from the films or TV shows it was based on. For example, it replicated that distinctive 1980s pastel-and-neon look nicely for the Miami Vice sections.
Overall, Stuntman: Hollywood stuck to the spirit of the franchise while dragging it into the modern era visually. It was great fun to play, and very addictive. Sure, it will be pretty throwaway and ephemeral, but if you ever fancied yourself as a stunt driver, it should more than tick all the boxes.
Stuntman: Hollywood‘s release date is TBD, but it will launch on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Estudio EA