Development

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is the debut title from Fuse Games, a studio in Guildford formed in January 2023, and it is published by Secret Mode under license from Lucasfilm Games. This page collects what the studio, the publisher and Lucasfilm Games have said publicly about how the game was made: how the team grew, who leads it, and the design thinking that produced the handling model described on Gameplay and Controls and Repulsorcraft. Anything the people who made the game have not said in public is left off.

Fuse Games

The studio was founded by five people. CEO and co-founder Matt Webster has named the other four publicly only by their first names, Al, Drei, Pete and Steve, so no fuller identification of them exists in public material. Three years on, in January 2026, Webster wrote that the studio had grown from those five to over 75 staff, and that collaborator studios across the UK and the wider global industry were contributing more than double that number of people to Galactic Racer. The credited headcount on the game is therefore considerably larger than the studio payroll behind it.

Webster has described the founding goal as building a genre-leading, player-first studio that fuses close attention to game feel with blockbuster spectacle, and a team that mixes deep industry experience with newer talent. Galactic Racer is the first thing Fuse Games has shown the world, which the studio has repeatedly called out as what makes the project special to it. The partnership with Lucasfilm Games ran across the whole of development rather than being a licensing formality, and the studio has said that collaboration shaped decisions as specific as how grounded each vehicle class should feel.

Leadership

Five leads at Fuse Games and one at Lucasfilm Games have been named publicly in connection with Galactic Racer. Below is each role as it has been stated, with the remit where one has been described.

The design leads

Bill Lane studied Engineering at university. After deciding civil engineering was not the career he wanted, he took a job at Electronic Arts as a QA tester and worked his way into Criterion, a studio he had been a fan of for years. He used the engineering background to move across into game design, with design credits on Burnout Paradise, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Need for Speed: Most Wanted, before leaving to join Fuse Games. As Game Director on Galactic Racer he oversees design across the whole game and concentrates on the long-form systems that hold a run together.

Mark Bridges holds a Physics degree and got his first industry job at Firemint in Australia. Back in the UK he joined Criterion and eventually landed a role as a Handling Designer, which he has described as an unexpectedly good fit for the degree: physics gave him a methodical, scientific way to break an experience down into parts, while an interest in amateur dramatics and theatre gave him the other half of the job, thinking about what a player is feeling and building systems that engage it. As Design Director he owns the second-to-second layer of Galactic Racer, the handling, racing, abilities, parts and upgrades covered on Combat and Takedowns. He also put the theatre background to work on the production itself, performing the motion capture for Kestar Bool.

Designing the handling model

The clearest published account of how the game was designed is about traction, and about deciding to throw it away. One of the first prototypes modelled repulsorcraft the way a wheeled vehicle is modelled, with grip bound to the surface underneath, partly because the films themselves shot repulsorcraft scenes using cars with mirrors hiding the tyres. The team concluded that was wrong for the fiction. A repulsorcraft does not lay its grip onto the ground based on the surface, it holds the track through technological means, so the surface-bound traction model had to go. Removing it let the team build across a far wider range of terrain types and gradients, and, as Bridges has put it, it unlocked speed. A lot of speed.

Pulling the other way was a request from Lucasfilm Games that each craft stay grounded in physical reality, so that a player could pick one up and expect it to behave sensibly rather than learn an unfamiliar paradigm from scratch. Landspeeders were built to drive mostly like cars, with rally cars and Paris-Dakar off-roaders as reference. Speeder Bikes drive mostly like bikes, down to the rider leading the bike through a turn the way a real rider does. Skim Speeders, which Fuse Games invented for this game in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, were built to fly like a plane precisely because that gave the new class a real-world analogue to be grounded against, with footage of air racing through slalom gates as reference. Podracers were treated, in Lane’s framing, as horse and chariot crossed with Formula 1.

Tracks were then built to a very wide speed band rather than one target. The studio has said there are courses that play at 300 kilometres per hour and courses that play at 1000, and that making both feel good was among the hardest parts of the job. The single toughest technical problem, by the Design Director’s account, was reconciling ground detection on vehicles that hover, which raises awkward questions about what undulating terrain, high speed and steep jump angles should do to a craft that is not touching anything. The stated goal was intuitive physics that are not classically correct but still feel right, locked down before abilities, parts and upgrades were layered on top.

Asked what he was proudest of, the Game Director named three things: the Ramjet, which he called truly game defining, the audio team’s contribution to how the game feels to play, and the sense of speed, which he has described as the fastest thing the team has ever made and fast enough that the studio wondered how players would handle it.

Music and Voice

The score is by composer Gordy Haab, working with Nathaniel Daw, and it was recorded at the Vienna Synchron Stage. The main theme was released as a single on September 18, 2026, and the full soundtrack album is scheduled for October 6, 2026. The announced voice cast is Lucy Montgomery as Hibi, Andrew James Spooner as Darius Pax and Kris Laudrum as Kestar Bool, with Mark Bridges performing Kestar's motion capture. The details are on Music and Voice Cast.

Production timeline

The dates below are the publicly announced production milestones. Development ran for roughly three and a half years from the formation of the studio to release.

Going gold means the build is finished and signed off for manufacture, a term that dates back to pressing a gold master disc. Webster has described it as the point where a team has cleared its own quality targets plus the certification processes at the publisher and the platform holders, and has called it the moment the studio’s original 2023 vision became something it could actually hand to players. The editions that build was pressed into are covered on Editions and Pre-Order Bonuses, and the platforms it ships on are on System Requirements.