Around this time last month, WB Games made the stunning announcement that they were closing three video game studios. We know that Monolith Productions were working on a Wonder Woman game, and that Player First Games was failing to revive Multiversus. Now, we know what the third video game studio was working on.
At the time, Kotaku confirmed that Warner Bros. Games San Diego was working on an unannounced free-to-play AAA multiplatform title. At the time, it sounded like they could have been making a Warner Bros. themed Fortnite competitor. That turned out to not be the case, but what they were making wasn’t that far off either.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Colin Moriarty revealed in the latest episode of his Sacred Symbols podcast that Warner Bros. Games San Diego was actually working on a kart racer. The racers would have picked out from Warner Bros.’ catalog of IP, in the same way that Multiversus assembled its roster.
WB Games’ kart racer was greenlit just as the pandemic started, and suffered from a large volume of employee turnover. Over 100 developers had worked on the game in total.
Moriarty claimed to have a source who may have been a former employee themselves. That source also told them that it was planned to be a free-to-play online racing game. It was planned to come to PC, consoles, and mobile.
However, it would later focus on a PC only release. Subsequently, this game was codenamed Moonlight, but received tentative game titles like XDR, which stands for cross-drift racers, or more obviously, WB Racers.
Moriarty also claimed the staff at the studio weren’t quite happy about how things turned out. In his words:
“There was quite a bit of animosity internally, with people who worked on the game who felt that it was unfair that their sister team Player First got to launch Multiverse twice when they never got a shot to launch at all after all of that work.”
Of course, as you may remember, Player First Games’ Multiversus immediately looked like it could have been a huge success out the gate. Issues with how the game was supposed to be monetized were never fully addressed, and that seemed to have led to what was actually a troubled development history for the platform fighting game.
On the other hand, it’s fairly easy to see a Warner Bros. themed kart racer could have been a huge success. In fact, Disney has a game just like it right now, called Disney Speedstorm. Warner Bros. characters have also already been in games like this in 2000, in the form of Looney Tunes Racing for the PlayStation and Game Boy Color, and Wacky Races, for Windows, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, DreamCast, and Game Boy Color.
If Jason Schreier’s claims are accurate, this game likely didn’t stand a chance in front of WB Games’ management, who just didn’t have it in them to meet their own ambitions. It’s strange too, since it supposedly met their own standards of a game that used their legacy IP, but they may have undermined this project with other unrealistic expectations.
And while this doesn’t mean that there will never be a Warner Bros. themed kart racing game, it’s now really hard to see WB Games having a bright future at all today.
