Gran Turismo Sport | 20 Years of GT | PS4 Pro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0OTcB0ln8Y
Why Yamauchi wanted to make a game for PlayStation
Why Yamauchi-san made Motor Toon Grand Prix
Why Gran Turismo felt so real
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0OTcB0ln8Y
Kazunori Yamauchi wasnt meant to be making Gran Turismo. When he began his work on PlayStations landmark racing game, little did he know that he was breaking ground on a series that would stand right alongside PlayStation, right up to the latest entry in the series, Gran Turismo Sport.
Back in 1993, over a year before PlayStation was launched in Japan, Yamauchi was a producer for Sony Music Entertainments small videogame development team. And one day he met a young business planner called Shuhei Yoshida, who had just joined the PlayStation development team led by Ken Kutaragi.
I remember I was very impressed with his knowledge, passion and drive to learn how to make games with real-time 3D graphics technology, says Yoshida, who heads Sony Interactive Entertainments Worldwide Studios today.
Yoshida was tasked with helping to form the software line-up for SIEs first console, and he found Yamauchi a great source of help. He had a lot of ideas and made input into the design of PlayStation and the original PlayStation controller, Yoshida says. I remember he even offered to playtest prototype PlayStation controllers using students of his fathers school.
Why Yamauchi wanted to make a game for PlayStation
Yamauchi was very interested in the hardware capabilities of the PlayStation console. Having cut his teeth making 2D games for the 16bit era, he saw a chance to make something in which hed been interested for many years.
I first took interest in realtime 3D when I was around the third year in junior high school, probably around 1983, he says. At the time, personal computers were brand-new and my hobby was to make games on them. It was really just wireframe graphics, but that was the time when I first really took an interest in 3D graphics.
What he really wanted to do was to make a realistic driving simulator. But back then it was a radical concept and it was hard to convince executives to give it a go, he says, so he pitched 100 game ideas of all kinds of different genres.
Why Yamauchi-san made Motor Toon Grand Prix
He was right. The executives didnt take him up on the driving simulator, but Yamauchi had a plan. What I did was to start a project in the racing game genre that was easier to understand for the executives, he says. We secured the budget for creating Motor Toon Grand Prix and we pushed the project forward, but in the background wed actually already started the development of Gran Turismo.
But that didnt mean Motor Toon Grand Prix was half-baked. Releasing in mid-December 1994, two weeks after PlayStations Japanese launch, it was a colourful karting game but its cartoon stylings were powered by sophisticated 3D graphics and physics. It soon gained a strong following and, predictably, there were calls for a sequel.
I was able to secure the trust of the executives to create games on my own, and thats when I presented the Gran Turismo project to them and development officially started.
Why Gran Turismo felt so real
https://blog.eu.playstation.com/201...-back-at-gran-turismos-inception/#sf121680720Gran Turismos car physics were extraordinary. The way tyres rode the camber of a road and bumped over curbs was a level of simulation that hadnt been achieved before, certainly not on a home console. And each of the cars in its huge 140-strong roster handled differently and would change as you tweaked or added new components, such as spoilers and suspension.
The system was able to accept detailed parameters in order to make the simulation, says Yamauchi. For certain cars in the game we had very detailed data, the design data and also the measured data from the cars, so we could model them in very high detail. Unfortunately, that wasnt always available. Some manufacturers were not willing to part with that level of data, so in those cases we had to make educated guesses. But usually it wasnt far off, accurate enough that we get the proper character of each of the cars.
But while its simulation was finely detailed, Gran Turismo was also friendly to new players. While Yoshida didnt have a great deal of creative involvement in the game, he was able to offer his view as a non-car enthusiast to help tune the physics engine for people like him.
I remember in a playtesting session during the tuning of the title, Kazunori watched 20 or so play testers crashing into the wall when they were not able to apply the break early enough before going into the tight corner, he says. Kazunori was like, OK, I see it, we will make the handling easier for the regular players!'