A 10-Year Wait: The Excitement of the Superbike World Championship Returns with SBK22
Milestone is back on the SBK franchise and it’s quite the news! The Superbike World Championship is an important part of Milestone’s history.
We first started working on the title back in 1999 when the company was only three years old, and this game was also the first “bike” Milestone created.
The third game of the series, Superbike 2001, is one of the most famous bike games ever made and still is in the heart of lots of fans.
Then we went back to the SBK paddock in 2007 when we created SBK-07, a new and more accessible game available for the 6th generation consoles, followed by SBK-08 available for the 7th generation.
In 2010, SBK X marked a great success and an important turning point in the Milestone’s history.
We kept the series until 2012, when we created SBK Generation, a real love letter from Milestone to the SBK World Championship.
I personally have a special connection with the SBK games, they are the main reason I applied to work for Milestone when I was a young designer. Eventually I was lucky enough to be the Lead Designer of SBK Generations and now one of the masterminds behind our new title SBK22.
SBK22 has the spirit of our old SBK games with all the Milestone’s know how and updated technologies, the perfect recipe to achieve a game that truly represents today’s Superbike World Championship and the state of art of the motorbike simulation. The game is made in Unreal Engine and includes several technological innovations such as the Milestone’s Neural AI System, Weather Simulation, a faithful engine sound system, the Milestone’s signature handling system and much more.
But games and racing are not made only by technologies, people are also the base for both, and to faithfully recreate the riding sensations and the experience of being a real Superbike rider, we had multiple helpful conversations with the champions of the real sport, Bautista, Rea, and the current champion Razgatlioglu. The SBK bikes are based on production bikes but developed to be the ultimate racing machines, and in SBK22 our players will be able to experience all the real feeling and behavior of those racing beasts.
We have our philosophy, when we approach a game; we applied the Milestone method that is based on the faithful and realistic representation of the real sport, that is why in SBK22 players will find an exact mirror of the real championship, with all the sessions like pre-race, Tissot Superpole and Tissot Superpole Race, as well as the circuit, the teams and more. It’s also possible to live a challenging career experience in which players create they own story inside the Superbike championship starting from the bottom to race their way up to the top, with also the possibility to make their independent team and win with it.
SBK22 is accessible for every type of player, as our aim was to recreate the real sport making it enjoyable for every taste. Our hardcore players will like competing at the maximum level of difficulty without riding helps, but may other fans of the World Superbike Championship might prefer and enjoy a more moderate stimulation, engaging in epic battles against their heroes.
We are truly excited to be back at the SBK paddock, our fans have been asking us to do it for years, and we are sure that they are going to enjoy playing the game as much as we did developing it.
SBK™22
Milestone S.r.l.