I still remember the moment the loading screen faded and I was dropped into the stunning Mexican landscapes of Forza Horizon 5 for the first time. The festival atmosphere was electric, the car list was already making my head spin, and I was itching to start filling my garage with legends. But honestly, my eyes kept wandering to one car in particular. Not the hypercars or the trophy trucks – no, I was obsessed with the 1982 DeLorean DMC-12. It’s not just any car, you know? It’s the time machine from Back to the Future. I mean, who hasn’t dreamed of hitting 88 miles per hour in that stainless steel beauty, with the flux capacitor humming and the gullwing doors slicing through the air? I had to have it.
Now, back in 2021 when the game launched, getting your hands on this particular piece of movie history was... well, a pain in the gearbox. The intended paths were either grinding through the Series 1 Summer Wet Season playlist, praying for a lucky wheelspin, or shelling out a fortune at the Auction House. None of those appealed to my impatient soul. Wheelspins felt like opening loot boxes in real life – sure, you might get gold, but you’d probably end up with a horn that sounds like a rubber chicken. And the seasonal reward? That meant I had to wait weeks, completing challenges when I just wanted to cruise the volcano road with a Mr. Fusion strapped to the back. It was a proper dilemma.
That’s when the whispers started circling in the community. Players who spent more time poking at the menus than actually racing had stumbled upon something strange. A glitch. A beautifully simple, almost laughably easy exploit that let you buy the DeLorean outright for a measly 15,000 CR. At first, I thought it was just another online myth, like those “press Alt+F4 to gain super speed” tricks. But the more I read, the more it seemed legit. So, with a mix of skepticism and hope, I fired up my Xbox one evening and decided to try my luck. And boy, am I glad I did.
The whole process felt almost ceremonial. From the main menu, I slid over to the ‘Garage’ tab and then jumped into the ‘Car Collection’ screen. There, I navigated to the DeLorean Motor Company manufacturer. The space where the DMC-12 should have sat was empty, of course—just a sad little silhouette with a padlock on it. This is where the magic happened. I hovered over that empty space for a good few seconds, feeling a bit like Marty McFly staring at his parents’ high school yearbook photo, willing something to change. Then I backed out of the menu completely, slow and deliberate, and re-entered the Car Collection screen. Wouldn’t you know it, the prompt to purchase the car suddenly popped up. 15,000 CR. Fifteen. Thousand. I nearly dropped my controller. I hammered that button faster than I’ve ever shifted gears, and just like that, the stainless steel body was mine, sitting in my garage, reflecting the neon lights of a home I’d only just started building.
It was a total head-scratcher how something so simple could break the progression so completely. One moment I was staring at an untouchable icon, the next I was tearing through the dunes at the Baja circuit, twin trails of sand kicking up behind my wedge-shaped dream. The glitch removed that whole layer of RNG anxiety—no more waiting for a super wheelspin that would almost certainly give me another pair of skinny jeans for my avatar. It felt like the game itself had thrown me the keys and whispered, “Go ahead, you deserve a little time-travel fun.”
Of course, I couldn’t keep it to myself. I told a few buddies, and word spread in our little group like a desert wildfire. We all had our DeLoreans within the hour, and suddenly our convoy looked like a Back to the Future reunion tour, minus the Hoverboards. The glitch didn’t just save us time; it made the first week of the game way more memorable. We even started testing it on other empty slots in the Car Collection, wondering if the same trick worked for other locked vehicles. It didn’t always pan out—most manufacturers stayed stubbornly locked—but there was a real thrill in the possibility. The whole situation reminded me that sometimes the best parts of a game aren’t the perfectly balanced systems, but the little imperfections that let you peek behind the curtain.
Now, looking back from 2026, that glitch is a distant, fond memory. Playground Games patched it out within the first few months, as they rightly should. But those early days of Forza Horizon 5 were something special, weren’t they? A time when a glitch gave an iconic car to so many of us without the grind, and we all got to live out our Spielberg-inspired fantasies a little earlier than planned. It was a tiny rebellion, a footnote in the game’s history, and I still smile every time I scroll past that DeLorean in my virtual garage. I earned it, in a way—not through skill on the track, but through the sheer joy of a community that shared a wonderful, fleeting secret.