Summary
- WB San Diego was working on a canceled kart racer codenamed Moonlight with characters like Scooby-Doo and Tom and Jerry.
- The game was inspired by Mario Kart and would have featured stylized graphics and fine vehicle control in Unreal Engine 5.
- The kart racer project was never fully developed and released due to changes in gameplay models and the success of MultiVersus.
According to a former employee, video game developer WB San Diego was working on a kart racer before the team was laid off and the studio shut down by Warner Bros. Alongside WB San Diego, Monolith Productions and Player First Games were also canned in February 2025, and players now have some insight into one of the projects that was in development before the big closures.
First established in 2019, WB Games San Diego provided development support for a number of Warner Bros Interactive video games, ranging from titles starring Batman and Harry Potter to more recent releases in the Mortal Kombat series. While various Warner Bros titles have found success over the years, more recent titles have struggled to perform well among critics and audiences, leading to the shutdown of multiple studios and various game cancelations.
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In a private Patreon podcast by former IGN writer Colin Moriarty that has now been summarized by WGB, it was revealed that a former WB San Diego employee reached out to Moriarty to share information on a canceled kart racer. This former employee stated that the game was codenamed Moonlight and was planned to star a number of familiar faces from the Warner Bros roster, including characters from Adventure Time, Scooby-Doo, Tom and Jerry, and more. The game had several potential names, such as WB Racers and X-Drift Racers, and would have acted as a sister-title to the now defunct fighting game MultiVersus. Moriarty alleges that he even saw gameplay of the WB kart racer, which he claims “was inspired by Mario Kart” and featured “stylized graphics and fine vehicle control” in Unreal Engine 5.
WB San Diego Kart Racer Took a Backseat to MultiVersus
The source of the information on the canceled WB San Diego project shared several thoughts on why the game was likely never fully developed and released. They stated that it began as a free-to-play online multiplayer title that would be released across Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles, as well as on mobile, but then the Switch and mobile ports were dropped in favor of a PC release. It was then changed from an FTP model to a paid game with a planned early access Steam launch, leaving the development team bouncing back and forth between platform ports and UI models. In the end, they felt the title was doomed once MultiVersus got multiple releases, leaving WB San Diego’s kart racer without a fixed launch. Whether this will ever be officially confirmed remains a mystery, along with any further details on the Warner Bros kart racer that never was.
Audiences often lament the cancelation of games that were never officially announced, and it would seem WB San Diego was among the many teams to never see their projects brought to fruition. While some fans may be keeping their fingers crossed that the remnants of the WB San Diego kart racer will be revived by Warner Bros Interactive one day, it is often best advised to focus this optimism on games that are officially confirmed for release.
- Date Founded
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January 14, 2004
- Headquarters
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Burbank, California, United States
- Parent Company
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Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Warner Bros. Games