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. 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. 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. Driving lines, weight shifting, drifting you name it. If you didn’t know how to corner correctly, the 100-page instruction booklet and racing strategy guide would teach you. You couldn’t just yank the steering with reckless abandon, and you couldn’t cannon through the courses completely ignoring the brakes. Gran Turismo’s realistic handling meant that gamers needed to focus on their racing skills more than ever. Manic Street Preachers were right: everything must go (fast). The result, however, was a blockbuster that literally rewrote the rules of the road. But there was simply no blueprint for the colossal car game Polys Entertainment were making here. Yes, Codemasters first brought the very excellent TOCA Touring Car Championship to the original PlayStation in 1997. 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. 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. 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. In fact, despite his devotion to the project, even Yamauchi himself fully expected it to be a niche game. Which was handy for Yamauchi, considering he and his team had already been developing it in the background since the very beginning.īut there was no guarantee Gran Turismo would be a hit. With a pair of successful first-party exclusives under his belt, Yamauchi re-pitched Gran Turismo to the powers that be. ![]() 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. 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 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. 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. However, the first time Yamauchi floated it, the idea sank.
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