Stuntman Hollywood Revives the PS5 Stunt Racer After 19 Years

Stuntman Hollywood, revealed June 2 at Sony’s State of Play, brings the dormant stunt-racing series back to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC under developer Saber Interactive. It is the first new Stuntman game in nearly 19 years, built around movie-set missions and licensed cars from Fast & Furious, Back to the Future and Knight Rider. The game is wishlistable now, with no confirmed release date.

That gap matters. The series went quiet in 2007 partly because the thing players loved about it, the demand to nail a film-set stunt run on a tight number of attempts, was also the thing that made many of them quit. So the most useful question about this reveal is whether the new mission structure repeats the trap or sidesteps it.

What Saber Showed at the State of Play

The reveal trailer opens on chaos: a school bus barreling through a set, cars trading paint, pyrotechnics going off behind a stunt run. Saber pitched it as an arcade racer wrapped around movie production, where each licensed film becomes a level and you play the stunt driver hired to land the shot. The studio detailed the structure in the official PlayStation Blog post on the stunt-racing revival, which breaks each film into episodes that double as stages.

The licensing is the loud part. Saber confirmed cars and sets drawn from a roster of Universal and NBCUniversal properties, with two machines doing most of the marketing work: K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider and the Time Machine from Back to the Future. The full set of named tie-ins:

• Fast & Furious, the obvious anchor for a car-stunt game
• Back to the Future, supplying the Time Machine
• Knight Rider, supplying K.I.T.T.
• Miami Vice, the 1980s crime drama
• Death Race, the demolition-heavy action franchise

Beyond the brand-name vehicles, the announcement listed everyday rides too: SUVs, motorcycles, muscle cars and that school bus. The licensing runs through Universal Products & Experiences and NBCUniversal, which puts the film studio’s own catalogue, not generic stand-ins, behind the cars and sets.

The Difficulty That Built the Series, Then Buried It

To see why this reveal carries weight, you have to go back to 2002. The first Stuntman came from Reflections Interactive, the British studio behind Driver, and shipped on the PlayStation 2 through Infogrames under the Atari label. The idea was novel: you weren’t racing rivals, you were following a director’s shot list, hitting jumps, drifts and near-misses in the exact order the script demanded.

It was also brutal. One missed beat in a long sequence meant restarting the entire scene, and the loading between attempts dragged. Reviewers praised the concept and the physics while flagging the punishing retry loop. The game built a cult following on the strength of its premise and lost a chunk of mainstream players to frustration.

That tension never really left the franchise. The appeal and the pain came from the same source: a stunt run only counts when you execute the whole choreography clean, so a single error wipes the take. It made the highs feel earned. It also made the lows feel cheap, especially before checkpointing was generous.

How Ignition Softened the Strikes in 2007

The franchise changed hands at E3 2006, when THQ announced it was buying the Stuntman property and the studio Paradigm Entertainment from Atari. Paradigm built the sequel, Stuntman: Ignition, released in 2007 for PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Ignition’s big fix was the strike system. Instead of failing a scene on the first mistake, players could accumulate several errors before the director called for a full reshoot. It loosened the choke point that had defined the original and earned warmer reviews for feeling fairer without losing the stunt-choreography core.

Then the series simply stopped. THQ slid toward bankruptcy and folded in 2012, its catalogue scattered at auction, and Stuntman sat unused for years. Nineteen years passed between Ignition and this reveal, long enough that a generation of players has never touched the franchise that inspired it.

Where the New Mechanics Echo the Old Ones

Here is the part returning fans should read closely. Saber’s description of Stuntman Hollywood keeps the structural DNA that made the series both distinctive and divisive. Each film is split into episodes, a director sets objectives inside each one (drift through this section, ride on two wheels here, crash through that), and you work against a limited number of takes. A star-based scoring system rewards precise, stylish runs and unlocks stunt awards and garage trophies.

The studio also named its modern reference points. Alongside the original Stuntman, Saber called Burnout and Split/Second its key touchstones, two arcade racers built on spectacle and crash physics rather than simulation. That signals a faster, more forgiving feel than the 2002 game’s stop-start grind.

The retry pressure is still in the design; the question is the dial setting. Saber gets to decide how punishing a missed take feels, how fast a reset is, and how many stars a sloppy run still earns. Get that balance wrong and the 2002 complaints come straight back. Get it right and the series finally has the accessibility its premise always deserved.

A Bet From a Studio That Just Went Independent

The company making that call is in a very different position than THQ was. Saber Interactive spent years inside Embracer Group, then split off in 2024 when Embracer sold it to Beacon Interactive, a vehicle controlled by Saber co-founder Matthew Karch, for $247 million. The deal, detailed in Embracer’s release on the Saber divestment, closed in March 2024 and left Saber as an independent operator again. Among the studios it retained is one named Stuntworks, a detail that reads differently now that a Stuntman game is back on the slate.

The classic Stuntman game was so memorable for me, it’s always been a dream to recreate such a legend of gaming history, and evolve it into something new.

That is Tim Willits, Saber Interactive’s chief creative officer, in the studio’s announcement. The multi-platform plan is its own statement: PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC at launch. That breadth stands out against Sony’s own recent move to keep its marquee single-player titles off the PC track. A third-party revival going wide on day one is hedging its audience across every box it can reach.

When Can You Play It?

No firm date yet. The PlayStation Blog lists the game as coming soon, and the wishlist is live across storefronts. Some coverage of the reveal pointed to a 2027 target, though neither Saber nor Sony has confirmed a window.

It landed in a stacked show. The June State of Play ran past 60 minutes and stacked more than 20 titles, opening with Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine (dated September 15, 2026) and closing on a new God of War. Stuntman Hollywood shared the runtime with Control Resonant, Until Dawn 2 and Silent Hill: Downfall, as the full June 2 State of Play lineup built around Wolverine showed. You can see the studio’s own breakdown in Sony’s roundup of every State of Play announcement.

For a franchise that has been dead since 2007, getting a slot on that stage is its own kind of vindication. The trailer sells the fantasy. The strike count will decide whether players stick around for the second take.