What you need to know
- Forza Horizon 5 has released for Xbox and PC.
- Xbox Australia & New Zealand celebrated by dropping a real man and car from a helicopter hovering 4,500 feet in the air.
- This is the latest in wild Microsoft-funded marketing stunts, hot off the coattails of the company's Windows 11 PR antics.
You know what's cooler than playing Forza Horizon 5? Playing Forza Horizon 5 after you received your physical copy as a reward for jumping out of a helicopter at 4,500 feet.
The Xbox Australia & New Zealand team decided to get a little crazy with its marketing efforts and thought dropping a man and car from a 4,500-feet-in-the-air helicopter would get us all in the mood to play Forza. The Xbox ANZ team knew what it was doing.
A man and a Forza Horizon 5 Polaris both took the plunge, in a video you can watch over on the XboxANZ YouTube page.
At the end, the helicopter-abandoning, death-defying man receives a crate of physical Forza Horizon 5 copies as a reward for taking his life into his own hands. In other words, the video has a very happy ending. But it also advises people to not replicate the stunt, mainly because it's unsafe but also because you're probably not going to receive free Forza goodies for doing it.
This whole thing may have you wondering, "what else does Microsoft productively spend money on?" And the answer is: Other crazy marketing. Do you remember the creamy, skyscraper-sized lengths Microsoft went to to promote Windows 11 in October?
Gotta go fast
Forza Horizon 5 maintains the series' reputation for being effortlessly excellent. So, uh, buy and enjoy.
