While his team was making Gran Turismo, Kazunori Yamauchi wrote off his own car. “At one point during the production of Gran Turismo I couldn’t tell the difference between the real world and the game world,” he told Edge in 1997. “I ended up crashing my Skyline GT R on a public road. Luckily, no-one was hurt, and I escaped with minor injuries, but my car was completely destroyed.” The game he was making put that obsession on the PlayStation: real production cars, bought second-hand, tuned part by part and raced only after the player had passed a driving test. Edge gave it ten out of ten, a score it had given only once before, to Super Mario 64.
Fast facts
- Developer: Sony Computer Entertainment’s in-house team led by Kazunori Yamauchi, which became Polyphony Digital in 1998.
- Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment.
- Platform: PlayStation.
- Released: Japan, December 1997; Europe and North America, May 1998.
- Full title: Gran Turismo: The Real Driving Simulator.
- Sales: more than 10 million copies, by Polyphony’s figures.
From Motor Toon to Gran Turismo
By 1997 Yamauchi had been making racing games for Sony for almost five years. He worked on the cartoon racer Motor Toon Grand Prix and its sequel before heading a newly assembled team, called G7, in the autumn of 1996. A game in which players could race real production cars had sat in his “to do” folder for four years by the time Sony approved it. Writing for the series’ 25th anniversary in 2022, Yamauchi said Gran Turismo was the first project plan he wrote when he entered the industry in 1992, and that the project began with “two part time artists and three engineers”.
The new game kept part of the old one. “We did use a part of the original Motor Toon engine,” Yamauchi told Edge. “Gran Turismo uses a part of the physics model used in Motor Toon.” Akihiko Tan built the physics model, which Edge reported had been four years in the making. It treated each of a car’s four wheels separately, so that a car clipping a kerb bounced its front wheels first and leaned over in corners. Yamauchi said realism had not been the starting point: “Instead of starting from the scientific angle, we started from the desire to build cars that could really be driven, in a very tactile way. We knew that if we could succeed at that, then we would make a realistic game.” The team rented more than 30 cars to test the feel and record engine sounds.
Buying, licensing, tuning
Gran Turismo had two halves. The arcade mode offered quick races on a handful of tracks, starting with Japanese cars. The GT mode was the real game. The player started with a small sum of money, bought a new or second-hand car from Japanese, American and British makers, and raced to earn more.
Championship races needed a licence. There were three to earn, each with eight tests, Computer and Video Games explained: the first asked the player to drive a small car flat out for a kilometre, then brake and stop inside a marked box, all in under 36 seconds. The hardest, the International A licence, opened the way to the fastest races. Edge counted 13 cups, from four-race meetings to 60-lap endurance races, including events restricted to front-wheel, rear-wheel or four-wheel drive cars.
Prize money went back into the car. Players could change ride height, brake balance, suspension stiffness, gear ratios and turbo boost, and Edge reported a fully tuned Mitsubishi GTO with “an astounding 955bhp”. Nobody quite agreed on how many cars there were. Edge counted 87 models in a preview version in 1997; for the finished game, Sony’s publicity claimed “over 250”, while later sources usually give 140. The Japanese release supported Sony’s new Dual Shock controller, which vibrated under hard acceleration and braking, and its analogue sticks could steer and control the throttle.
Reception
Edge’s review of the Japanese version, in February 1998, called it “possibly the greatest driving game of all time” and praised above all the handling: “anyone whose motoring experience extends beyond prosaic machinery is able to differentiate between front, rear and four wheel drive vehicles”. It still found faults: few cars on the track at once, which it blamed on the PlayStation’s limits, slowdown during replays, and in-game music it called “atrocious”. Its editorial set the game beside Super Mario 64 as the only other ten, for a game that “so brilliantly straddles the divide between a comprehensive simulation and an accessible, incredibly playable arcade game”.
The European version arrived in May 1998 with changes. Sony sped up the arcade mode and let cars leave the ground over bumps, which Edge regretted, and replaced the Japanese music with tracks by Western bands. The GT mode was untouched, and Edge gave the PAL version ten out of ten as well.
Sales and the series
The game kept selling for years. Edge put worldwide sales at six million in April 1999, and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine reported more than seven million that November, as Gran Turismo 2 was on its way with about 20 tracks, “more than double the number that was in the first game”. Polyphony Digital’s later figures put the first game’s sales at 10.85 million, and Wikipedia describes it as the best-selling PlayStation game.
Sony re-formed Yamauchi’s team as Polyphony Digital in April 1998, before the Western release, and the studio has kept making the series ever since. When the series turned 25, Yamauchi announced that it had sold more than 90 million copies as of November 2022.
Sources
- Edge issue 51, November 1997, pp. 56–60: preview and visit to Sony in Tokyo: Yamauchi’s Skyline crash, Motor Toon Grand Prix, the G7 team, 87 cars in the preview, the physics model and Akihiko Tan, Yamauchi on realism, the 30 test cars.
- Edge issue 55, February 1998: editorial (the second ten out of ten, after Super Mario 64) and pp. 86–89, review of the Japanese version (ten out of ten; licences, cups, tuning, Sony’s “over 250” cars, the Dual Shock, the criticisms).
- Computer and Video Games issue 196, March 1998: Gran Turismo feature (the three licences and their tests, the International A licence, Dual Shock support).
- Edge issue 58, May 1998: UK release dates.
- Edge issue 59, June 1998: review of the PAL version (ten out of ten).
- Edge issue 70, April 1999: worldwide sales of six million.
- Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine vol. 3 no. 2, November 1999: Gran Turismo 2 preview (more than seven million sold).
- Kazunori Yamauchi, “Celebrating 25 years of Gran Turismo”, PlayStation Blog, 22 December 2022 (web, secondary): the 1992 project plan, the first team, and series sales of more than 90 million by 16 November 2022. https://blog.playstation.com/2022/12/22/celebrating-25-years-of-gran-turismo/
- “Total Gran Turismo sales revealed as series hits its 25th anniversary”, PlayStation LifeStyle, 22 December 2022 (web, secondary): the first game’s 10.85 million. https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2022/12/22/total-gran-turismo-sales-revealed-as-series-hits-its-25th-anniversary/
- Wikipedia, “Gran Turismo (1997 video game)” (web, secondary): release dates, 140 cars, Polyphony Digital’s April 1998 founding, Polyphony’s 10.85 million figure and the game’s place as the PlayStation’s best seller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Turismo_(1997_video_game)