For those not competing in or attending the U.S. Open, there’s still an opportunity to get close to Shinnecock.
A few months ago, I met a guy at an amateur event. The tournament was being contested on his home course, though he didn’t play as much as he’d like because of a serious back injury sustained in a car accident. He did, however, share that he was an avid gamer and had created his home course on PGA Tour 2K25. He then invited me to play against he and his friends online.
So, I got the game – on Nintendo Switch 2, though it’s available on other platforms like PlayStation, Xbox and PC – and dove in, quickly discovering that there were thousands of courses designed by people around the world, plus a good-sized catalog of in-game courses, including three of this year’s major venues – Aronimink, Royal Birkdale and, of course, Shinnecock. When you play Shinnecock, it’s just like a U.S. Open experience, complete with crowds, grandstands and signage – it’s just a lot easier to hit a tee shot when you do so virtually.
Thanks to Josh Muise, the senior creative director for HB Studios, for answering a few questions about how a course like Shinnecock goes about being in 2K, along with what else is new this year:
BR: “Let’s start with the stuff that’s new, because that’s probably the most exciting top of mind for you, but what can we expect?”
JM: “This is our sixth season that’s going into the franchise, and so we’re gonna be bringing in Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which is a huge get for us. Again, we are equal parts golf fan as we are game-maker at this point, having been so lucky to consecutively work on golf over all these years. So that’s a very exciting one to bring in, and that is tying into the 126th U.S. Open. … Pair that in with a new shot type that we’re bringing in, which is the long recovery shot, where we’re giving players more ability to build out that dream meta build golfer that has many tools in their toolbox at their disposal to really refine their game.”
BR: When you add a new course like Shinnecock, what’s the process of getting that into the game, from the idea of, hey, we want to do this, to it actually being, you know, existing in the game?
JM: “It’s really grown and evolved over time for us, where the way we work today, we’re so lucky to have built up kind of a lasting relationship with so many different parts of the core golf industry. That’s through our partnership with the Tour, great partners like Tiger Woods. It’s really opened doors for us and given us the ability to start to interact with some of these truly sought-after clubs that, as a small independent golf developer 10 years ago, I’m sure our chances of getting these opportunities would have been more limited. So now we’re able to work with these groups independently. As we assess and kind of look at what the right fit for the product would be, what the fans are kind of clamoring for, and the types of events we want to bring in, so if we’re seeking something like an Open, where is that Open going to be to deliver that authentic one-to-one experience?
“And so, in the case of something like Shinnecock Hills, we will have our scan team get together. This is a team of individuals who are going to go down, be on site, work with the greenskeepers, get access to this course. They’re going to be flying drones over the holes, they’re going to be taking topographic Lidar data. We’re really scanning everything down to that micro level of detail to ensure that we’re getting contours, undulations, topography, to try and really match it as close as we can to that player experience, so that we want you to feel like if you’ve ever experienced that course and had the privilege to play it in real life, you’re going in and playing in our game. It’s feeling so intimately familiar and one-to-one. We’ve really done our best to ensure that authentic experience.
“And for the players who haven’t had the opportunity to play those courses, they’re getting to see just how challenging these courses really are. With the added benefit of having some of those special skills I talked about before added onto their digital avatar, which probably makes it a lot more manageable than, you know, an 18 or 20 handicap walking out onto Shinnecock Hills themselves, so we take the scan data, we bring that back, we put that into our kind of digital pipeline, for lack of a better term. We have our team of artists, which is our 3D group, working through the environment, looking at the specifics, kind of recreating and building that natively in our engine, which is Unity, which is what we use to build our product and our game. And then ultimately, we go in, we playtest, and we kind of bring all the pieces together.
“We then work really closely with all of these courses to ensure that they’re also feeling like they’re happy with the way that it’s moving, and so it’s really this kind of long-lasting relationship that when we do get the opportunity to bring a great course in. We want to see this as something that we can bring in for the fans and really put our best foot forward, keep that group involved every step of the process, and then get it out to the world.”
BR: About how long is a process like this? How many days is the team on site? What’s kind of the review period?
JM: “We have gotten incredibly efficient. I will say, like, given that we are also keenly aware of how in demand these properties are, especially during golf season – because we tend to want to scan them when they’re showing their best, right? We want to capture that really peak moment as a player, as a fan. And so, they graciously find a slot for us, but that team is really working at the utmost efficiency now, where we’ve been at this a pretty long time. To their credit, they’ve refined their task. You probably get a group of … we’ll say three to six individuals showing up on site, coordinating and working with somebody on the ground for the logistics, avoiding players or members who are going to be on the course that day to ensure, just again, that they’re getting their true experience. We never want to be intrusive. We never want to kind of break the flow of that day-to-day experience.
“And so they work in silence. You know, we’ve jokingly called them ninjas for a long time, because I think that unless you knew they were checking in for the day, most folks may not even notice that they’re there. We tend to give ourselves a handful of days, I think at the longest, because occasionally we’ll hit a weather delay as well, much like real golf. But usually, it’s only a couple of days, rarely have we had to get much beyond that to be able to capture the whole course in all of its glory.”
BR: There are thousands of courses created by gamers, too? I know a guy who has created his home course using geographical surveys, photos, etc.
JM: “I am always in sheer awe of the lengths our players and creators will go to on their course creation journey. The way we kind of look at it is we build the best tools that we can, and we focus on getting those tools in the hands of the creators, but we are floored when we hear stories of people going to great lengths to ensure that they’re trying to build from memory, or photos, or just fantasy courses in general, so it doesn’t surprise me to hear that some folks go to even, you know, greater lengths. I remember a story a couple of years ago that broke where Ryan McCormick on the Korn Ferry Tour was using our game to plot out courses that were maybe less played courses or going to different areas that weren’t in games before, and he started going through a similar thought process of kind of stamping these out to get better ideas of how these courses could play.
“Those stories are always super cool and super validating for our team, right? Because we truly take that kind of tools-first approach to it, and wanting to put good tools in the hands of players, we take great pride in being given the opportunity to craft these well-known courses from your Sawgrasses to the Shinnecocks of the world that we talked about. That’s kind of one set of challenges, and the other one is like, OK, taking everything we’ve learned from building these great courses, how do we reflectively switch this into tools so that you can become the next digital Pete Dye and do-it-yourself?”
BR: What’s the biggest improvement you feel like 2K25 has made over the previous?
JM: “I wish I could have, the opportunity to kind of go around the team, because I think everyone has certain pieces that they are so proud of, where this really was that 10-year overnight success story, I think, if you came to the franchise later, where, you know, we’ve been at this for a pretty long time now, and we’ve had these kind of incredible milestones along the way of going from an unbranded indie to partnering with the Tour, partnering with 2K, getting Tiger Woods. And now this next step was bringing majors into the product, and being able to have three majors, bringing more iconic courses to the players, but then also not being afraid to go back and really look at something that ultimately was working really well, which was our swing system.
“So, bringing in Evo Swing, and then ultimately kind of this perfect swing system for new players, it gave us a chance to look back on the work that we’ve done and kind of rekindle some of that ambition to really push it forward. So graphical fidelity went forward, but those new gameplay mechanics really made it feel fresh. It was something that our returning players noticed, new players got to come in and have success early and often, and then we’ve really pushed out the multiplayer and social side, where something that I think as a person who golfs themselves and also plays golf games is, you know, we would be remiss if we didn’t continue to pay attention to that social side and that camaraderie piece of golf, where, you know, that’s really a special part of this sport, is you playing golf with pals, winning together, or losing together, or going head-to-head, every version of it.
“So it’s something we’ve really tried to keep close, so things like Ranked Tours was a new addition this year that brought in a more competitive aspect to you versus other players. But then we also brought in, you know, more licensed content for that My Career, if you were a single player as well. So, I know it’s a very broad answer, it’s hard for me to narrow it down, but I would say, if I was to put a finer point on it, it was just the sum of the parts in the sense that we were really able to kind of bring it all together this year, and put our best foot forward, and then bringing the majors in at that time was just a really great, a really great, I guess, win for the team.”
BR: “I’m pretty terrible at putting. I haven’t figured it out yet. Any advice?
JM: “Remember, you always have your putt preview. You’re able to use that as well to kind of show you the break.”