Asphalt Legends Unite Celebrates 20 Years with Epic Portal Track (And Teases Future Crossovers)

The Asphalt franchise has evolved immensely since its debut in 2004, though it’s never lost the sense of thrilling arcade action that inspired that very first entry. Asphalt Legends Unite, which is the latest entry in the franchise, has expanded the toy box even further while still retaining that arcade-style, and now Gameloft is going all out and celebrating the history and legacy of the franchise for its 20th anniversary in a truly unique way. ComicBook had the chance to speak to Gameloft Barcelona Marketing Director Arnaud Benefice all about the big anniversary milestone and celebration, which includes an epic track that literally combines three different tracks from the franchise’s history, though we also talked about some of the big-time collaborations for Asphalt Legends Unite and even got some teases for what’s coming up down the line.

Videos by ComicBook.com

Asphalt Legends is entering its 7th year, but the team isn’t slowing down on the content, and it’s also continuing to add new features to the game that fans have been asking for. “Asphalt Legends, the latest entry in the series, has been on the market for seven years now. It’s a game that has been built and built and built over, so it has a wealth of systems. We started with things that were very straightforward, but we’ve added co-op modes, and we’ve added team-based modes where you have security versus criminals, where you’re actually doing a chase. We’ve added the gauntlet mode recently, which is a mode where you have five races in a row and you have to pick a car for each new competitor, and so it’s five different stages that you’re doing in a row when you’re competing. So yeah, Asphalt has become sort of aggregative, adding modes and adding different options for playing,” Benefice said.

“And we’re always trying to look for the next, what is the next mode that we could be adding to the game? What are our players asking us for? The chase mode, the cops and robbers mode I was talking about, this is something that our player base had been talking about for years, and we thought, okay, let’s actually give it a shot,” Benefice said. “We had the opportunity with Unite when we moved from Asphalt 9 to Asphalt Legends Unite, where the crux for Legends Unite was to have this cross-play and this cross-platform and to allow everyone to play together. Okay, that is a perfect fit, right?”

A Track Like No Other

When you’re celebrating a milestone like 20 years, you’ve got to go big, and the Asphalt team truly took that to heart. Instead of just redoing a previous track or even several tracks, they decided to combine several tracks into one, but even that was turned on its head when they decided to use teleports.

“Usually, when we do a new track in the game, we try to think of a concept first before thinking of locations,” Benefice said. “Like, okay, we want a track that is going to be jumping on top of buildings, for instance, and then we had the Chicago track, which was on the rooftops. Well, this one, how do we showcase our legacy? How do we go back, grabbing onto the older titles, building in our roots, and how do we showcase this?”

“And we brainstormed a lot of ideas. Do we bring back an old track, sort of like how Mario Kart has some legacy tracks from the Nintendo 64 era? And we thought, yeah, but in our realistic game, if we do something pixel, it’s going to look really weird and it’s not going to gel with the actual car models,” Benefice said. “And so after a lot of thinking, we landed on this crazy suggestion, which at the time we laughed at because we didn’t think it was technically possible.”

“Let’s put three tracks together into a single one, and we’ll put teleporters in between. I mean, that sounds exciting,” Benefice said. “Can we do that? And then you turn to the devs and you see the faces that they’re making, but we started brainstorming on this and we started thinking, okay, actually, maybe we can do this. So maybe we can do a track that is going to be combining three tracks into one, where you will have a section from a different environment that is going to be connected to the others by portals that allow you to teleport from one to the other. And each part of the track can be from a different entry in the franchise.”

“So what we have right now is, essentially, we’ve been bringing the San Diego track from Asphalt 8, the whole track as it was in Asphalt 8. Every route that was in there, obviously, you know, visually updated because Asphalt 8 at this point is over 10 years old, but as it was,” Benefice said. “So anyone who used to play at the time is going to be able to, first of all, find that experience, but on top of that track, which goes through the San Diego harbor, goes through a refinery area, there’s a point where you’re jumping up the bridge and trough a container, and you teleport and you’re in Cairo from Asphalt 9, which is one of our favorite tracks that is currently in the game,” Benefice said.

While this part of the track is making its welcome return, there have been some tweaks made to keep things fresh. “We’re not just reusing Cairo, we’re using Cairo with a different sun, like a different setting. Cairo normally is like midday, super bright,” Benefice said. Here it’s a sunset now, so you have a different hue on the track, and then you continue going and you teleport and you’re in LA. You’re in the iconic, like where you have the Terminator 2 scene. So you go through that, which is a classic track from Asphalt 6, and now you have a truck where you jump from Asphalt 8 to Asphalt 9 to Asphalt 6 in the same track, and you don’t lose your momentum from section to section. You’re jumping off the airplane carrier and you’re landing full speed ahead, and the more we talked about this, the more we thought like, yeah, that’s so cool. Let’s do it.”

Now, if that wasn’t enough, the team has also gone back and made the original game that started this whole journey playable, and anyone can play it since it’s now available on the browser.

“And then on top of this, there’s going to be tons of rewards. I mean, it’s our 20th anniversary, we’re going to be giving a lot of stuff for free. There’s going to be daily rewards, there’s going to be joining rewards, etc, and we’re bringing back Asphalt Urban GT. There is going to be a browser version of the game that’s going to be playable on asphaltlegends.com, as it was back then on the Java phone. The original Assault Urban GT, and if you finish it, if you complete it, you might even get a little reward in Asphalt Legends.”

Big Time Collaborations (And More Are Coming)

The Asphalt franchise has also been delivering some big-time collaborations over the past year, including with LEGO and Sonic the Hedgehog. The LEGO partnership was sort of a happy accident, and as we’ve seen from what they’ve released so far, it has created something really cool for the game, and more from that partnership is on the way.

“More recently, we’ve had collaborations like LEGO, which this one has been a really big one, and it’s one that is going to last even further because we’ve already launched three, but we have two more coming that have already been announced,” Benefice said. “And to be honest, it’s going very well, so we’re looking at potentially even expanding further than that, and this one is a full one, right? Because we’re not just adding a decal in the game or adding some customizations.”

“They’re an actual LEGO car. It breaks into pieces when it crashes into things, which, by the way, was a mandatory thing on our side. This is something that happened a little bit by accident. We ended up talking with someone on the LEGO side, and we found out that we actually had a very good fit because they have this line of LEGO Technics that are like hypercars, so this was very, very natural, and it’s been super exciting,” Benefice said. “The player reaction originally was a mix of super surprise, some disbelief, but also very much hype. There are lots of players who are very excited. The idea of, like, so I can make the car and I can build it in real life. I can also drive it in the game. That’s really engaging and cool.”

“And, yes, Sonic was actually also a bit of a stroke of luck because we ended up talking with SEGA last year about what we had upcoming, and we were thinking at the time that we wanted to try something in the world of video games,” Benefice said. “And Sonic would be a pretty natural fit. All about speed, the fastest thing alive, and it turned out that, oh, 2025 is going to be the year of racing for Sonic. It’s been a super exciting franchise to work in. We have a mega, mega Sonic fan also on the team, and that helped a lot.”

“We selected the best music tracks that we could find, and what character would fit with what car. There were a lot of discussions about, like, should Amy be a Lambo or should she be on a Porsche? What fits the best for her, and it’s super successful, and it’s been very well received by our usual fans,” Benefice said. “It’s also been super well received by the Sonic fandom, which is a very, very welcoming fandom we found out, and so it works.”

As for the future, we did get a tease of something cool IP team-up headed to the game for Halloween, and there is also more anime on teh horizon, but we aren’t sure exactly what those projects are just yet. “So in the future we want to do more of this. We’re looking towards more potential collaborations. We have two things that we’re cooking up at the moment, and we are going to have something for Halloween,” Benefice said. “I can’t talk exactly about the IP yet, but it is going to be something horror-oriented, this I can say. And we are also going to go back to the world of anime later this year. That I can say.”

You can find out even more information on the official website right here, and you can jump into the new track and all the 20th anniversary festivities in Asphalt Legends, which is available now on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PlayStation 5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Steam, iOS, Android, Epic, and More.