Star Wars: Galactic Racer wants to tell a post-war story grounded in real racing history

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Published Jun 23, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

Fuse Games explains how it drew on real hot rod history to create a post-war racing game.

There’s a version of a Star Wars racing game that’s creatively low-effort. Toss a bunch of familiar characters into podracers and send them zipping around iconic locations from the films. That’s not Fuse Games’ style. For its debut game, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, the team put a lot more thought than you might expect into how racing fits into the wider political tapestry of a war-torn galaxy. It may be an arcade racing game, but it’s every bit as narrative-driven as Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi series.

After demoing Galactic Racer at this year’s Summer Game Fest, I spoke with Fuse Games creative director Kieran Crimmins and Lucasfilm Games executive producer Craig Derrick about what went into creating the first Star Wars racing game in 20 years. For both teams, it wasn’t about going the safe route and playing to Nintendo 64 nostalgia. Instead, it was a chance to return to something that had a major influence on Star Wars: George Lucas’ love of hot rod racing.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is a bit of a dream project for Fuse Games, a studio founded by racing game veterans who worked on the Burnout series at Criterion Games. Crimmins told me that the team has been dying to make a Star Wars racing game. (He pointed out that podracing was a significant influence on the Burnout series.) Lucasfilm Games, meanwhile, wanted to work with a developer who had some fresh ideas for the franchise. It just made sense for the two to come together. The mutual goal was to make a game that paid tribute to Star Wars racing classics, but wasn’t just content to play the hits.

“You can’t make a Star Wars racing game without acknowledging [Star Wars Episode I: Racer] and its impact on Star Wars gaming generally,” Derrick told Polygon. “There’s so many of us that were all in on playing it on the Nintendo 64. It was more of a conversation of how we incorporate it. We wanted to make a game that evolved from just podracing. Throughout all of Star Wars, there’s a lot of racing. The influence is felt not just in the content, but even in how the movies are paced. That all goes back to George Lucas. The other part of it, canonically, is that not everybody can race a podracer. How do we authentically bring podracing in, but how do we expand it to be more than that?”

With that question as a guiding star, the team set out to make something that went one step beyond a podracing game. Galactic Racer features multiple vehicle types, which all play differently and have their own real-world counterparts. Skim Speeders, for instance, are meant to feel like low-flying planes, while Speeder Bikes are motorcycles. There are still podracers, but they’re in a class of their own, acting as the universe's equivalent to fragile F1 cars.

What’s immediately noticeable about these cars is how scrappy they look. They’re all cobbled together from metallic junk, which flies off during slow-motion crash sequences. That design philosophy comes straight from Lucas. The Star Wars creator is a noted hot rod enthusiast (as seen in his 1973 film American Graffiti), and his love of racing was very much an influence on the vehicles he created for Star Wars. Lucasfilm Games and Fuse Games went back to that influence to design their vehicles and draw up what the game’s Galactic League should look like.

“There’s very much this found universe — that these vehicles are scrapped together,” Derrick said. “That’s very much hot rod culture. So, from the hot rod culture of the post-World War 2 era, it was very much, what do we want to do with landspeeders? How do they feel as racing vehicles, like a rally car? It all comes out of a conversation about storytelling and aesthetics.”

This needs to be a sports story at its core.

Derrick is alluding to a fascinating moment for hot rod racing. While the sport was popular in the 1920s and 1930s, it lost momentum when World War II began and resources were redirected to the war effort. When the war ended, hot rod racing saw a huge boom in popularity. Soldiers had just returned home with newfound mechanical expertise, and there was a surplus of military vehicles sitting around. The leftover energy and scrap from the war wound up going into a high-speed hobby that kept veterans busy.

Both teams were thinking about that period in American history when trying to construct a story for Galactic Racer. It only made sense that their game should also be a post-war story in some way. Thankfully, there was a perfect moment in Star Wars history to explore that idea: the New Republic Era.

“What is that time in our era? That would be after the fall of the Galactic Empire and the beginning of the New Republic,” Derrick said. “After the war, these characters that are pilots and mechanics, they have these skills that they have no outlet for. It gives you the freedom to invent a lot of characters who don’t have to worry about the galactic stakes. It starts to become more of a localized story for us. We reference the movie Rush and Ford v Ferrari, and all kinds of racing dramas, to get that local story. There was a big galactic war. Now that war’s over. What happens to those characters? What do they do next? We think some of them are out racing in the salt flats and racing these incredible machines.”

That combination of post-war history, Star Wars, and sports films all came together to build the single-player story in Galactic Racer. The narrative centers around the Galactic League, a new racing organization set up by Darius Pax. Players take on the role of Shade, a driver who is hell-bent on defeating the league’s star racer, Kestar Bool. It has the drama of a Hollywood movie, with a scrappy driver trying to overcome an egotistical jerk.

“This needs to be a sports story at its core,” Crimmins told Polygon. “The kind of feelings and scenes we were coming up with were all in that space. Then we collaborated. What in the universe is the best way to do that? Trying to tell that sports story and that post-war boom reference kind of developed into the character Darius Pax. He’s a dreamer. He’s an old pod mechanic. He’s an absolute believer in the sport. After the war, all he’s thinking about is making the Galactic League.”

For Crimmins, every mechanical decision comes back to storytelling. For instance, the single-player story unfolds in a unique roguelite structure, where players must complete a run of multiple races while picking up stat boosts. It’s a smart structure for a racing game, but it’s also one that fits into how racing is portrayed in the Star Wars universe.

“One of the main things we’re trying to do is give people more options,” Crimmins said. “At the core of a lot of racing games is the idea of building your own machine, and that has so much synergy with those kind of roguelike games. I think we’re at the point now where we have trillions of combinations that you can do. You can create incredible builds that do incredible things. As soon as you hit on that, you’re like, this makes so much sense for a racing game. It makes so much sense for a Star Wars thing where you’re building up your vehicle, and it’s a bit of a junker. It’s also in that hot rod space, so it’s just a match made in heaven.”

All of these decisions come together with Fuse Games’ decade of experience to create a racing game that already feels special. It’s getting at something that’s core to the Star Wars universe, but so rarely discussed. Fuse Games is also having fun taking a bunch of characters who have just finished fighting in a heated war, and watching them recreate their political strife in a racing league. There’s no war between Jedi heroes and evil empires here, but Galactic Racer feels like it's telling as thoughtful a Star Wars story through racing as any other high-stakes movie or game.

While Fuse Games is telling a wholly original story here with a new cast of characters, you can still expect plenty of Easter eggs and tie-ins to the wider Star Wars universe. That includes a character that is inseparable from podracing, one that still binds Galactic Racer back to Star Wars Episode I: Racer.

“We’re bringing back a lot of the iconic podracers,” Derrick said. “Sebulba has a fairly significant role in our story. He’s not just a character you pick in Arcade mode; he actually has a history. In a fun and unexpected way, you’ll see a different side of him in this game.”

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