Gran Turismo: Looking Back at a Legend

There’s a piece of Gran Turismo trivia that’s been doing the rounds for years; niche UK marque TVR once attributed an increase in sales to exposure it found through the original Gran Turismo. It’s mentioned here in this 1up.com article, and here on respected GT fan site GT Planet it’s specified the sales spike was in Japan, and that it was a six-fold increase.
15 years on from the release of Gran Turismo the cult British sports car manufacturer is out of the car business (the TVR name was last heard to be headed for use on a new line of portable wind turbines), so confirming the veracity of TVR’s alleged claims may prove difficult. I do, however, find myself believing them.
The power of a series like Gran Turismo can’t be underestimated; not when it comes to putting your products in front of millions of engaged car fans worldwide.
Take Ruf, for instance; a small, German company that has been producing cars for over 35 years. It may have made a splash back in the ’80s with properly hardcore car enthusiasts when its CTR ‘Yellowbird’ (the fastest sports car in the world at the time of its release) annihilated the Nurburgring, but today Ruf is well-known amongst racing gamers the world over. Ruf cars, you see, are built from unmarked Porsche bodies and chassis. Thanks to EA’s exclusive stranglehold on the Porsche license, cosmetically similar Ruf vehicles have been appearing as Porsche proxies in the GT series (and elsewhere) ever since Gran Turismo 2.

Suck it, Porsche.

“Today the brand is also connected to younger generations through its appearance in number one selling driver computer games, opening the potential to new buyers across the world,” said Genii Capital founding partner Gerard Lopez after becoming a shareholder and strategic partner to the German automobile manufacturer in February this year.
EA’s squatting on the Porsche license has infuriated fans of the marque for years. It’s for good reason, to be honest; for 364 days a year the license is more or less idle. It’s only relevant for the one day each year a Need of Speed game comes around, and even then we only ever see a couple of models from its 80+ year history.
Terrible for fans, but perfect for Ruf. Ruf, as a result, is part of Gran Turismo. That’s free eyeballs on Ruf, the world over. Millions of them.
Several Japanese car manufacturers have attributed popularity increases in their models directly to Gran Turismo, including Nissan, Subaru and Mitsubishi.
"There's no doubt that Gran Turismo played a huge role in our decision to launch the Lancer Evolution in the United States," said Mitsubishi official Takashi Kiuchi back in 2002. “The car wouldn't have attracted as much attention as it has in the United States without the game."
The first seven Lancer Evolution models were only officially released in Japan. The cult, AWD sports saloon made its debut in the US with the Evo VIII.
Before Gran Turismo you had to be a WRC anorak or a JDM import addict to even know what a Lancer Evolution, or a Subaru Impreza WRX was. That was the power of Gran Turismo.
There have been other similarly excellent racing sims that have arrived on the scene in the meantime, but they’re all here because of Gran Turismo.

We may be 15 years on from the global release of the original Gran Turismo back in May 1998 (the game was released in Japan on December 23, 1997), but work on the game actually started back in 1992, while the PlayStation console itself was still in development. Gran Turismo was one of many proposals series godfather Kazunori Yamauchi made at the time; Yamauchi maintains it was really blind luck that he actually wound up working on Gran Turismo at all.
The thing is, before Gran Turismo, realism wasn’t especially high on the agenda when it came to racing video games. Ridge Racer’s simple, Game & Watch-esque handling was proving more than sufficient, few developers were even bothering to license real-world cars, and selecting manual transmission while playing Daytona was about the most meaningful mechanical customisation most mainstream gamers ever made. Racing simulators were the stuff of PC neckbeards, so to speak.
At least, that’s what the industry seemed to think.
Gran Turismo, then, was quite an anomaly. Nobody had made a game like this for a console. It was unprecedented. Assembled by a tiny team that varied between seven to 15 people, Yamauchi expected it to be a niche game. It was not.
In fact, it went on to become the PlayStation’s best-selling game. Its success may have been a surprise, but in retrospect it’s not hard to see why it worked.
Need for Speed II, released in early 1997, had nine licensed cars. Gran Turismo had 140. Plus 11 tracks. On a compact disc. It was madness.
But it didn’t stop there. There was depth. Oceans of it.
The realistic handling meant gamers had to re-educate themselves; this was no arcade racer. It required smooth driving and patience. That’s where the license tests came in.
There was an economy. Players had to juggle their funds to purchase and collect new and used cars. It kept you playing. You couldn’t just reach up GT’s skirt, have at the goods, and move on to the next big thing. You needed to grind away. Polyphony Digital had turned a racing game into an RPG.
Then there was the tuning. Almost everything that did anything on your car could be replaced and/or tuned. Gamers were introduced to a world of fascinating car customisation they never even knew existed, and motorheads were won over by a car game that actually understood their passion. Like FIFA and football fans, or Wipeout and recreational drug users, Gran Turismo tethered two different cultures together: car geeks and gamers. They've overlapped ever since.
Gran Turismo was, and remains, a phenomenon. It’s teased by some (including, at times, myself) for its irksome idiosyncrasies and shunned for being “boring” by gamers with the attention spans of hummingbirds, but you simply can’t ignore the success of this series. The series is nudging 70 million units sold. It’s been Sony’s top performer on all three PlayStation consoles. Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec sold over 14 million copies alone and, as Colin pointed out a few days ago, 9 million copies of GT5 sold means the game has a superhuman attach rate of about one game per eight consoles.
Gran Turismo isn’t just a pillar of the PlayStation Parthenon; it’s part of the foundations.
Today's 15th anniversary event at Silverstone promises "something big" relating to the future of the Gran Turismo series. The short odds are on Gran Turismo 6.
Either way, here's to 15 more years.

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by Luke Reilly

May 15, 2013