Start Your Engines: An Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Matt Webster

My start in games came by accident. Growing up, games were just something I loved, not something I thought I could be a part of. I started playing at a young age when an older brother got himself a Commodore Vic-20 – I must have been nine or ten years old. From that, I moved on to the Commodore 64, Sony MSX, and the Atari ST before my thoughts of leaving school and working in games became a reality. I had finished my A-Levels (High School Diploma) when my brothers friend said to him:

"Hey, your brother plays games, right? Some American game company is coming to town and are hiring."

That company was Electronic Arts and a week later I was hired for a job in Customer Service.

I quickly moved into game development at EA and worked with the legendary Bullfrog Studios on many titles. During the early 90’s the 16-bit console age started, and I began working with the emerging internal game teams at EA. An early game that illustrated to me the power of great people coming together to make something amazing was EA Soccer - a game that I had created the initial design for. Working with a small, talented team in Vancouver, Canada together we created the first version of FIFA Soccer - a series that has since become a global sensation.

Throughout my 32-year career at Electronic Arts I was incredibly fortunate to work on, and help build, a number of great teams, and great teams create great games. Whilst working on the Burnout series, the real power of game ‘feel’ struck me - that sense of deep connection and satisfaction with how you control a vehicle, or a character, in a video game. Games are an interactive entertainment medium, so the quality of those interactions, for me, are extraordinarily important. It helps suspend disbelief and is a huge part of the fantasy fulfilment that games have for players.

A racing game has to make players believe that they can expertly handle a vehicle at very high-speed at the edge of control. It also has to be approachable in that many people can immediately get an exciting speed fantasy and yet have accessible depth that compels players to strive for mastery. The feeling of risk and reward needs to be compelling, and players must feel they are making meaningful, consequential decisions, and learning to get better every time they play.

All of my experience over the years enabled me to bring lessons learned from the past into a new future. Together with four co-founders, when we founded Fuse Games, our goal was to create a world-class, genre leading studio that ‘fuses' uncompromising attention with game feel and innovative play, and compelling technical and visual / audio execution. To do that we needed to build a modern, high-performing team that combines deep experience with fresh game making talent - we want to have a studio that’s built to last. Star Wars: Galactic Racer™ is the first representation of Fuse Games to the world, making it an incredibly special project.

We’re fortunate enough to have worked in collaboration with the incredible folks at Lucasfilm Games before, so an idea for Fuse’s first game was to bring our love of racing and our love of Star Wars™ together. And like many good ideas, the more we thought about it, the more we fell in love with it! Presenting and sharing our ideas with Lucasfilm Games led to a creative collaboration that became the concept for Star Wars: Galactic Racer. This close partnership has extended over the years of development, and as we looked ahead to launch, we’re reminded how exciting, and humbling, it is to be part of the team building a new Star Wars racing game after such a long time.

In Galactic Racer, the fantasy is to be an elite racing pilot in the Star Wars galaxy. We want players to feel that fantasy, to be wowed by incredible speed, and to be totally immersed in an emerging racing series in a galaxy far, far away. We want to see the creativity of players creating builds that suit how they want to race. Learning how these vehicles handle and how vehicle parts, upgrades and abilities come together in builds that they can pit against the environments across the Outer Rim and beyond. Earning rewards from challenging risks and pushing themselves to compete against new and familiar faces.

© & ™ Lucasfilm LTD 2026.