Fuse Games: the ex-Burnout studio behind Star Wars Galactic Racer

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is Fuse Games’ first game — which makes “who are these people?” a fair question to ask before pre-ordering. The short answer: a Guildford, UK studio founded by five people out of Electronic Arts and Criterion, whose CV runs through Burnout, Need for Speed and FIFA. This page is built from the official interview with co-founder and CEO Matt Webster, published to the game’s own Steam news hub on 3 July 2026.

Matt Webster: Vic-20 to Fuse Games

Webster’s route in was, in his own words, accidental. He started on an older brother’s Commodore Vic-20 at nine or ten, moved through the Commodore 64, Sony MSX and Atari ST, and got hired straight out of A-Levels when a friend of his brother mentioned that “some American game company is coming to town and are hiring.”

That company was Electronic Arts, and the job was in Customer Service. A week later he was in. Highlights of what followed, all from the interview:

Era	What he worked on
Early career at EA	Moved from Customer Service into development; worked with Bullfrog Studios on many titles
Early 1990s / 16-bit era	Worked with EA’s emerging internal teams; created the initial design for EA Soccer
Vancouver, Canada	With a small team, built the first version of FIFA Soccer
Later	The Burnout series — where “the real power of game ‘feel’ struck me”

He spent 32 years at Electronic Arts in total before founding Fuse Games with four co-founders.

The studio’s actual thesis: “game feel”

The most useful part of the interview is not the CV, it is the design philosophy — because it tells you what kind of racer this is going to be.

Webster’s framing is that games are an interactive medium, so the quality of the interactions is the product. For a racing game specifically, he lays out four requirements:

1. Players must believe they can expertly handle a vehicle at very high speed, at the edge of control.
2. It has to be approachable — most people should get an exciting speed fantasy immediately.
3. It needs accessible depth that rewards striving for mastery.
4. Risk and reward must feel compelling, with meaningful, consequential decisions and visible improvement each run.

The studio name is a statement of the same idea: Fuse was founded to “fuse” attention to game feel with innovative play and strong technical and audio-visual execution. Webster also says the aim was a modern, high-performing team combining deep experience with fresh talent — “a studio that’s built to last.”

How the Star Wars partnership happened

Fuse had worked with Lucasfilm Games before, so an early idea for the studio’s first game was simply to combine their love of racing with their love of Star Wars. Webster’s account: the more they thought about it, the more they fell for it. They pitched it to Lucasfilm Games, and that turned into the creative collaboration that became Galactic Racer, with the partnership running across the whole development period.

He is direct about the weight of it — being the team building a new Star Wars racing game “after such a long time” is described as both exciting and humbling.

What the fantasy is meant to be

Webster’s summary of the player fantasy: be an elite racing pilot in the Star Wars galaxy, wowed by the speed, immersed in an emerging racing series. What he wants to see from players is build creativity — learning how vehicles handle, how parts, upgrades and abilities combine, and pitting those builds against environments across the Outer Rim and beyond, earning rewards from risks taken.

That lines up with what our best build and vehicles pages cover, and with the runs-based structure described on the story and campaign page.

What Creative Director Kieran Crimmins has said

Fuse’s Creative Director Kieran Crimmins, ex-Criterion Games, gave the on-record quotes during Summer Game Fest hands-on sessions. Two are worth knowing because they set expectations:

• On whether contact racing is viable, the way it was in Burnout: “It’s okay to give people a bit of a smash.” He adds that he doesn’t think the studio would “ever really want to make an arcade racer without some of that fun in it.”
• On build variety, he described the possible combinations as being “in the trillions.”

Note the framing the team keeps insisting on: this is not a sequel to 1999’s Episode I: Racer, and they would rather you didn’t call it “Podracer.” It covers multiple types of racing in the Star Wars universe — even though podracing’s most iconic characters and courses are in it.

Confirmed vs not confirmed

• Confirmed (official interview): Fuse Games was founded by Webster plus four co-founders; Webster spent 32 years at EA; he created the initial design for EA Soccer and helped build the first FIFA in Vancouver; he worked with Bullfrog and on Burnout; Fuse had worked with Lucasfilm Games before Galactic Racer; the studio’s design priority is game feel and risk/reward.
• On the record from the developer, via press: the “bit of a smash” contact-racing stance and the “trillions” of build combinations, both from Crimmins.
• Not confirmed: studio headcount, the other four co-founders’ names, and whether Fuse has a second project. The interview does not say.

For what the studio actually shipped into the game, start with the beginner guide and the game modes breakdown.