foreign [Music] was working at Sony Music Entertainment Japan publishing 2D Super Nintendo Platformers when he was drafted by the original PlayStation development team Shuhei Yoshida Yoshida needed software for Sony's first ever games console and it turned out Yamauchi was overflowing with ideas one of those ideas would be a true Game Changer a racing game like no other made before a realistic 3D Home console driving simulator packed with largely attainable licensed cars and bigger than any car nerd could have imagined it would completely reinvent the genre it would be the Crown Jewel of the original PlayStation
in their words the greatest racing game of all time it would be Gran Turismo Sony wasn't interested now to be honest Yamauchi had suspected his realistic racer pitch might be a little too radical and he was already prepared to Pivot to a different project the game motor tune Grand Prix still eraser but it's wacky cartoon sensibilities and The Proven mainstream appeal of cart races at the time made it seem like a safer bet for Sony Yamauchi and his team threw themselves into the silly bit stealthily sophisticated motor tune Grand Prix which arrived in December 1994
just two weeks after the launch of the original PlayStation in Japan it was a bold move considering motor tune Grand Prix is really just an anagram for no don't Mario GP rocks uh retweet but it worked and in 1996 Yamauchi and his Polly's entertainment team released a sequel with a pair of successful first party exclusives under his belt Yamauchi re-pitched Gran Turismo to the powers that be and this time they went for it which was handy for Yamauchi considering he and his team had already been developing it in the background since the very beginning work
on Gran Turismo actually began way back in 1992 two years before the PlayStation was released and well before the game itself had even been officially green lit assembled by a team that started at just five and grew to about 15 people the original Gran Turismo came together over five years which was actually a huge length of time for a game back in that era the scope of Gran turismo's Vision made for a massive amount of work for such a small team and as such Yamauchi and members of his polish crew were regularly found sleeping under
their desks overnight where is Costanza this was yamauchi's dream project and he was all in but there was no guarantee Gran Turismo would be a hit in fact despite his Devotion to the project even Yamauchi himself fully expected it to be a niche game console Gamers had demonstrated a desire to see their favorite arcade races distilled onto home consoles but it was really the PC space that was playing host to the emerging world of racing simulators would Gran Turismo resonate with console players after all Yamauchi Was preparing to Dish up a dose of drastically more
difficult driving to a Gaming Community primarily used to far more effortless arcade style drifting a mainstream audience for whom selecting manual transmission while playing Daytona USA at the bowling alley was probably the most meaningful mechanical customization they'd ever made yes micro pros and Papyrus were making huge strides on PC with their famous Open Wheel racing Sims yes codemasters first brought the very excellent Toka Touring Car Championship to the original PlayStation in 1997 also but there was simply no blueprint for the Colossal car game Polly's entertainment we're making here not on a Home console the result
however was a blockbuster that literally rewrote the rules of the road [Music] first released in Japan in December 1997 kazanori yamauchi's niece dream game became a monster critical and Commercial smash by the time it arrived in North America Europe and other territories in mid-1998 it had already sought its way to more than 2 million sails in Japan alone the tiny team at Polly's entertainment which in 1998 became politi digital had produced what would ultimately be one of the most important racing games ever made Gran turismo's realistic handling meant that Gamers needed to focus on their
racing skills more than ever this was no arcade racer you couldn't just yank the steering with Reckless abandon and you couldn't Cannon through the courses completely ignoring the brakes Gran Turismo demanded respect [Music] if you didn't know how to Corner correctly the 100 page instruction booklet and racing strategy guide would teach you driving lines weight shifting drifting you name it and if you didn't want to read it Gran Turismo shipped with a series of in-game driving tests players needed to pass before they could compete in the Championships anyway this was a game that required you
to prove you were good enough to play it and if you weren't good enough it was determined to make you good enough the first game designed for the original DualShock controller and its extremely welcome analog sticks Gran Turismo proved not only that consoles could host serious racing games but that Gamers were well and truly ready for much more than arcade ports in their living rooms then there was the tuning almost everything that moved cranked or made noise on your car could be traded or tweaked Gamers were introduced to a world of fascinating car customization they
never even knew existed and motorheads were won over by a car game that actually understood their passion for tinkering like FIFA and football fans or Wipeout and recreational drug users Gran Turismo tethered two different cultures together car Geeks and Gamers and they've been attached ever since it also had an engaging in-game economy Gran Turismo wasn't a free-for-all Sandbox we had to start out in its cheapest cars and grind out race wins to afford upgrades as well as purchase and collect new and used cars Yamauchi and his team had turned a racing game into an RPG
and turned the key on a brand new sub-genre of racing that doesn't cover everything though we haven't mentioned the graphics and is quaint and primitive as the early 3D era seems now through a modern lens it can't really be understated just how astonishing Gran Turismo looked back in the late 90s despite being made up of barely 300 polygons each of Gran turismo's cars were instantly recognizable and packed with as much detail as the PlayStation's puny processor would permit whether you were ogling the cars as the shiny models rotated in the showroom or watching them dice
on track in the stunning replay mode no racing game looked as good as Gran Turismo did and let's not forget the music garbage feet are in a Chemical Brothers remix of Manic Street Preachers Everything Must Go that I still can't play in my car without imagining I'm hurtling down the last sector of trial Mountain [Music] this was real Rock and it made Gran Turismo an important part of the evolution of video game soundtracks it's easy to forget that licensed soundtracks have pre-recorded music by existing artists went always the norm for racing in sports games it
was only the shift to the CD format that began to make this possible Gran Turismo can easily stand beside the likes of road rash Wipeout and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater as a key trendsetter from this era of course then there were the cars themselves yamauchi's obsession with automobiles saw Gran Turismo blow out into something way bigger than anything we'd ever seen before there were over 150 cars in the original Gran Turismo and sure maybe that doesn't sound like a lot today when Modern Day races are arriving with 500 600 or over 700 cars but rest
assured 25 years ago 150 cars was a borderline baffling number the standard version of Need for Speed 2 released the same year as GT had nine licensed cars 9. you could count them on your hands and still have a finger left over to scratch your head in confusion and what polyphony had achieved over 150 cars each with its own handling characteristics which could be altered by upgrades and tuning all smushed onto a compact disc a compact disc that already had 11 songs on it it was absolutely unprecedented GT's immense car catalog just didn't make a
splash with Gamers though it went on to make waves throughout the real-life motor industry and absolutely helped alter the trajectory of at least several now extremely iconic Japanese cars while the Subaru WRX and Mitsubishi Lancer Revolution were well known to Rally fans and the Nissan GTR had been involved in touring car racing in Japan Australia and the UK all three of these manufacturers have attributed popularity increases in their models directly to Gran Turismo and launches in New Markets like the US came in the wake of GT's release for instance while the first seven Lancer Evolution
models were only officially released in Japan the Colt all-wheel drive rally Legend debuted in the US with the Evo 8. with Mitsubishi claiming there was no doubt that Gran Turismo played a huge role in its decision to launch in the USA admitting the car wouldn't have attracted as much attention as it did in the United States without the game the impact of GT wasn't just felt by Japanese car makers either little known TVR one of only two UK car brands available in the original Gran Turismo reportedly enjoyed a six-fold sales increase in Japan following its
appearance in the first game Gran Turismo was making true stars out of its cars and it would begin to change the way the car industry looked at video games out of nowhere Gran Turismo had become a true phenomenon a bona fide best seller all over the place it eventually shifted just under 11 million copies going on to become the all-time best-selling game on the original PlayStation the meteoric rise of Gran Turismo would continue throughout the remainder of the PlayStation generation Gran Turismo 2 which arrived in Japan in North America in December 1999 and power territories
a month later quickly proved the success of the original was no fluke GT2 more than tripled the amount of cars in the game to almost 650 and was subsequently so huge it had to come with a second scratch and sniff disc to accommodate its massive girth that smells like pure gasoline a much-loved installment which kicked off with one of the series's most fondly remembered intros GT2 would go on to sell well over 9 million copies making it the third best-selling game on the PS1 the arrival of the PS2 brought with it the next chapter of
the Gran Turismo series well not straight away but eventually after a brief delay which is something GT fans had to get used to be incredibly anticipated Gran Turismo 3 a spec which hit Japan in April 2001 and the rest of the world two months later was like something out of the future bringing never-before-seen levels of fidelity to GT's Victorious brand of vehicular veneration it was more than just a Smash Hit selling more than 15 million copies it's the best-selling Gran Turismo game in the whole series and the second highest selling PS2 game of all time
2004's Gran Turismo 4 the mammoth successor that did everything GT3 did and much much more would go on to slot in just behind it at third on the all-time PS2 sales charts things did change a little for the GT series after that and Yamauchi has since conceded that the PlayStation 3 era was actually a nightmare for the politi team there was a lot of pent-up demand for Gran Turismo 5 which landed in November 2010 a lengthy four years after the launch of PS3 following a string of delays that hunger would ultimately help it become the
second highest selling game in the series but the game itself ended up being a bit of an uneven experience and one which relied heavily on giving gt4s aging garage and HD refresh to try and make the old PS2 car models possible on PS3 it also lost a little of its usual idiosyncratic charm by Leading a little too hard into its quirkiness and doing baffling things with some of its most exciting content one good example is its use of the famous Top Gear test track which debuted in GT5 just as the show itself was surging in
popularity worldwide however as opposed to doing something on brand with supercars GT5 opted to make your first race on it a slow slog in a VW Combi and followed up with another race between a bunch of 1944 Gable wagons a car designed for moving Nazis around during World War II when chasing Indiana Jones I have missed steps again rolling out those PS2 era relics and doing Daft things like taking players to the Moon Fair GT6 really was a better product overall to GT5 but it only sold half as many copies fewer than even GT5 prologue
after GT6 polyphony pivoted to the Esports focused spin-off Granger's most sport in 2017 and it would be nearly a decade until the studio would deliver gt7 deliver it they did of course in March 2022 the positive news is that except for its terrible micro transaction approach and an early update debacle that saw the game offline for over a day it is an accomplished return to that magical Automotive formula the original established a quarter of a century ago with five console generations and even a PSP installment under its belt the Gran Turismo series is the biggest
wheel down at the Sony cracker Factory the highest selling PlayStation series of all time it's hard to imagine if Gran Turismo hadn't been made that no one else would have ever merged RPG design with realistic racing and a mountain of cars and arrived with something that resembled it millions and millions of people proved they wanted this sort of game to exist so it only stands to reason that at least one of them would have stood in the position to make it one day but would it have had the same first party muscle Sony brought to
the table would it have inspired Microsoft to create the Forza Motorsports series to overtly rival it and would we even have the Forza Horizon Series without that [Music] he never really know but one thing we do know is that the impact the arrival of Gran Turismo had on the evolution of racing games as we currently play them is simply massive like Halo Street Fighter 2 or Grand Theft Auto 3 Gran Turismo changed the trajectory of an entire genre and it is one of the most influential racing games ever made not bad for a game that
was initially rejected for more on the newest chapter of Gran Turismo check out our review for our gt7 verdict and our performance analysis of gt7 on both PS4 and PS5 for everything else stick with IGN [Music]
