Gran Turismo has, for decades now, been an outstanding racing game.
But the franchise’s success can perhaps best be attributed to a single gameplay detail: it’s a realistic simulator, but it’s also an accessible one.
Pit it against modern driving sims like iRacing and it comes up short, but Gran Turismo is realistic enough without completely alienating the more casual audience it’s targeting.
And that wrinkle may be down to ex-PS Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, who was working as a producer at PlayStation when the original game was in development for PS1.
“It was the early days of the first PlayStation, and [series creator] Kazunori Yamauchi was working on the very first Gran Turismo,” he told PlayStation Insider.
“You’ll remember that on the cover it said that the game was the ‘real driving simulator’. During development, Yamauchi showed me a prototype of Gran Turismo, and I was among the first to play it.
“It was extremely advanced, perhaps too much so. But at first Kazunori Yamauchi didn’t take my feedback at face value, so he gathered around 30 consumers to test the game. And just as I expected, they all crashed without exception at the first turn, because the gameplay was so difficult.