Studio Profile
The reinvention of Italy’s longrunning racing studio
We visit Milestone to discuss the remarkable reinvention of Italy’s longrunning racing studio
Milestone’s life began in 1994 as Graffiti, one of the first game development studios in Italy. After its first release, a SNES adaptation of the Atari puzzle game Loopz, the studio quickly established its precedence in the field of racing games. Starting with 1995’s Screamer as Graffiti and then Screamer 2, Screamer Rally and
Superbike World Championship as Milestone, the company grew into one of Italy’s largest, and also most specialised, game developers.
“We were a small team. Very talented, I think,” says vice president Luisa Bixio. “We were able to work with many publishers.” In that first decade, Milestone worked with publishers including EA, Virgin, Capcom and Atari on licensed motorsport games. “At the beginning we had a very good time,” Bixio says. “Lots of work to do.”
Over time, however, the circumstances of racing-game development became more challenging. The transition from PC to console development was not straightforward for Milestone, and escalating technical demands placed strain on the studio’s in-house engine. There was also much more competition within the racing genre. “The company was not working well any more,” Bixio says. “For independent studios, it’s not simple. Some work well because they work with Microsoft and so on – but for others it’s very difficult.”
It was at this time that major publishers started buying up dedicated racing studios to produce big-budget motorsport games in-house. This clashed with Milestone’s renewed desire for independence, and made it harder for the studio to find the kind of work-for-hire contracts that had supported it through the lucrative first decade of its life. “If you want stability, it’s not very simple if you depend on others to give you a job,” Bixio says. “Looking at this situation, the company was not getting good results. We decided to change completely, and it has been a good decision.”
Milestone brought in
new management in 2011. Rather than seek out a permanent arrangement with a larger publisher, the company’s new leadership decided to transition the studio into becoming a publisher itself. “A difficult process, but it was the only way to change,” Bixio says. “The point is that we were very confident that we had good people in the company. Milestone had demonstrated in the past that we had the ability to make very good games. We changed some processes, but in the end it was to [increase] the capacity to make good games within the company.”
The studio’s new independence coincided with the acquisition of both the MotoGP and
World Rally Championship licences (although Milestone had worked on MotoGP before, the licence at that time was held by Capcom). This led to a run of successful games, including the well-received MotoGP 13. “That changed the mood of the company,” Bixio says.
Milestone has grown substantially in the last five years thanks to the success of these selfpublished licensed games. From 60 developers in 2012, it is now on the cusp of 200. Milestone is now the largest game-development studio in Italy and has become, in and of itself, a training ground for the country’s nascent development scene. Many of the studio’s leaders have spent the bulk of their careers at Milestone – technical director Ivan Del Duca was the first employee of the studio in the ’90s and, after an absence of a few years during the period of Milestone’s restructuring, has returned to lead the company’s internal engine team.
As Milestone adapted to independence it switched from its own engine to a heavily modified version of Unreal, which made the company more flexible when developing across multiple platforms. Investments in drone photogrammetry, dynamic weather and more advanced audio technology also helped the studio remain competitive within the racing-sim genre. At the same time, the studio benefited from access to its motorsport licensors’ data. “We have a lot of support from manufacturers such as Toyota, Ducati, Honda and so on,” says head of game design Ir vin Zonca. “We get a lot of information from the different motorsports, the different manufacturers, and we use it to teach people.”
Milestone’s position in Italy has been a help in both acquiring these licenses, getting access to real racing tracks, cars, data – and, crucially, helping with recruitment. Finding experienced game developers isn’t always easy. iIstead, it’s much simpler to find would-be developers with an enormous amount of passion for racing.
“This is something where the Italian games industry is closer to the British games industry,” says Zonca. “Italy and the UK have a lot of passion, knowledge and history about racing cars,” he continues. “We had a lot of battles on the tracks, and being Italian it means that you grow up in a country that celebrates Ferrari, Lamborghini. It’s easier to find junior staff who already know how a vehicle works, or what the achievements of Valentino Rossi are. I really think this makes a difference.”
This culture has made it easier to hire junior developers and train them to make the specific types of game that Milestone creates. “Italy has a passion for racing,” Bixio says. “And the other point is that Milestone’s processes make us very efficient. The bike genre is a niche, so to have success there you have to manage it with real attention. The bike market is not of interest to EA now, I think, because the numbers are not big enough. For Milestone they’re big enough because we’re quite efficient – that’s key. Bikes were quite a free market, so we concentrated there. At the same time, we were increasing quality so we could invest our budget
differently. Bikes have been a good genre for us, but we want to grow more.”
Milestone is currently undergoing another transition: from a successful developer of racing games for a specific audience to a massmarket middleweight publisher with its sights set on a broader audience. Upcoming arcade rally game Gravel is at the centre of this endeavour, a project that is the product of both Milestone’s history and its expectations for the future.
“When we start to create our own ideas we proceed in different ways,” Zonca says. “The first important part is asking ourselves – what would we like to play? What would we like to do? By doing this you’re sure that you will put a lot of passion into the idea.”
“Then, you have to start mapping the whole market of currently available racing games to understand where you can find a gap to fill,” he continues. “I could want to create a new Gran
Turismo, but I know that Gran Turismo is already available. Starting with our own idea, we have to modify it to ensure that our product can have its own space within the racing game world.”
Milestone still faces fierce competition, and the same market forces that have supported its existence as an independent studio have also permitted similar opportunities for other developers working in the same field. Getting ahead of the curve means anticipating bigger shifts in audience expectation. Irvin Zonca believes that Milestone’s 20-year history as a racing-game developer gives it an advantage in this regard.
“The market learns from history,” he says. “You basically have two main ways of approaching racing games – simulations or arcade games. You can see that there are years where one of the two is most famous or recurrent. In the ’90s it was just arcade, then PCs and consoles became more powerful and you had a lot of simulations. Then you had a lot of arcade
[games] like Need For Speed or Burnout, and now we are, I think, exiting the second phase of racing simulation – you think about Project CARS, Forza, Assetto Corsa.”
Despite Milestone’s history with simulation, Zonca believes that the arcade model is due for a resurgence. “This is where I would like Milestone to focus,” he says. “We love simulations, but I think sticking to simulation just because we like it would be a bad move because the market is very crowded. This is why we decided to design Gravel as a ‘simcade’ experience, because we noticed that a game like
Gravel was missing from the market. If you think about the ’90s you had a lot of arcade games like Ridge Racer, Sega Rally, our Screamer – and then games like those ones really disappeared from the market. We wanted to fill the gap.”
Motorbike-racing games
helped secure Milestone’s position in its years as an independent publisher, but growing from this point makes a move to four-wheel racing a necessity. “We don’t want to abandon two wheels,” Zonca says. “It’s very important to us. It’s been 20 years that we’ve been creating two wheel [racing] games. But if we want to keep growing as a company we have to find different ways of developing games... if we stay focused on where we already are, we can’t grow. We can stabilise the company, and that’s good, but it’s not the best thing to do. We want to grow, so we need to diversify our offering.”
Milestone’s new, stronger position is allowing it to expand into new areas and invest more broadly in the future. Gravel is part of this, but the theme runs much deeper. A recently established team is at work on the studio’s first, exploratory mobile game. “We’ll start with one title,” says Bixio. “It will be a licensed title. We have to understand this market. When we understand the rules of this market, we will invest more.”
The studio is also looking to expand onto Nintendo Switch, a move that would not have been possible had it not shifted its development processes over to Unreal Engine several years ago. As that decision continues to pay dividends, Milestone is looking ahead to the next generation of technology that will allow it to compete with the bigger publishers. “Not only do we try to have the best technology day by day, but we are investing a lot in the future,” Bixio says. “We are working on AI based on neural networks. It’s a topic that is very important around the world, and can be very important for Milestone.” Bixio believes that this improved AI technology will require around two years of development – that process is currently six months along, and involves collaboration with an external team.
“Videogames are technology,” Bixio says. “If you don’t look at the future, you cannot improve your game. It is the only way. If our R&D doesn’t work on the next engine, the next technology, you don’t arrive. You have to concentrate on what you’re doing, but part of the team should always look at the future.”