How Gran Turismo Changed Racing Games Forever

However, the first time Yamauchi floated it, the idea sank.

Sony simply wasn’t interested.

However, 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 Toon Grand Prix; still a racer, but its wacky cartoon sensibilities and the proven mainstream appeal of kart racers at the time made it seem like a safer bet for Sony. Yamauchi and his team threw themselves into the silly but stealthily sophisticated Motor Toon Grand Prix, which arrived in December 1994, just two weeks after the launch of the original PlayStation in Japan. The Japan-only original performed well enough for Sony to request a sequel and, in 1996, Yamauchi and his Polys Entertainment team released a follow-up – which was distributed worldwide.

With a pair of successful first-party exclusives under his belt, Yamauchi re-pitched Gran Turismo to the powers that be.

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 first released – and well before the game itself had even been officially greenlit. 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 Polys crew were regularly found sleeping under their desks overnight. 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 favourite arcade racers 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 customisation they’d ever made.

Yes, MicroProse and Papyrus were making huge strides on PC with a racing rivalry that spawned some of the most respected motorsport sims ever made. Yes, Codemasters first brought the very excellent TOCA Touring Car Championship to the original PlayStation in 1997. But there was simply no blueprint for the colossal car game Polys Entertainment were making here. Not on a home console. Not anywhere, really.

The result, however, was a blockbuster that literally rewrote the rules of the road.

First released in Japan in December 1997, Kazunori Yamauchi’s niche 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 soared its way to more than two million sales in Japan alone. The tiny team at Polys Entertainment, which in 1998 became Polyphony 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. 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. 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 analogue 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 customisation they never even knew existed, and motorheads were won over by a car game that actually understood their passion for tinkering.

It also had an engaging in-game economy. Gran Turismo wasn’t a free-for-all sandbox; we had 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 as 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 recognisable 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.