A brief history of Gran Turismo

The end of 2013 has been a pretty special time for console racers. A couple of weeks ago, the Xbox One arrived on shelves with the flawed-but-compelling Forza Motorsport 5 . Now PS3 owners have their turn in the spotlight with Gran Turismo 6, the latest installment of Polyphony Digital’s legendary franchise. Going into this review, I was eager to find out if the underwhelming GT5 was the start of a terminal decline or if creator Kazunori Yamauchi and his team knocked it out of the park.

The GT series of games spans three console generations and more than a decade and a half of time. The original Gran Turismo on the original PlayStation blew my mind in 1997, setting a new standard for what gamers could expect from a racing game. Mario Kart was fun and Codemasters’ TOCA Touring Cars had its moments, but GT was more than a game; it was a digital expression of love for the automobile. Contemporary rivals like Ridge Racer didn’t feature real cars, and even ones that did, like Need for Speed II, felt more like driving the idea of a car than a simulation of one.

GT came packed with 140 virtual representations that behaved like their real counterparts (as much as that was possible with that generation's hardware) and introduced a generation across the world to cult Japanese performance cars like the Subaru Impreza WRX and Nissan Skyline GT-R. Progress through the game involved a series of license tests, some of which could be maddeningly difficult, but the effect on one’s nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmentum area was hard to overstate. How else to explain all those late nights spent trying to thread cars between slalom cones like a lab animal repeatedly pushing a lever to gain a reward? Not to mention the odd broken controller, rendered nonfunctional after a frustration-induced meeting with the wall.

GT2 followed in 2000, packed onto two CDs, one of which had a scratch-and-sniff coating (burnt rubber, if I recall correctly). Reflecting the first game’s global success, GT2 expanded the first game’s stable of primarily Japanese and American cars to include European marques like Alfa Romeo, BMW, Peugeot, and TVR. Particular favorites included the Ford Ka, which I happened to own at the time, and Renault’s absolutely bonkers Espace F1.

Further Reading Gran Turismo 4

A mere 18 months later, GT3 A-Spec arrived, this time on the PS2. Despite being much smaller in scope, with only 180 cars, it looked and sounded spectacular for the time and featured a new, much more realistic physics model ( sound familiar to anyone )? In particular I still remember being stunned at the sunlight streaming through the trees on Trial Mountain. Fast-forward four years to GT4. Former Ars Games Editor Ben Kuchera thought it was probably the best car game of its time , but cracks were starting to appear, and by then a significant rival had appeared on the scene in

What followed from there reminds me of what happens when a successful band retreats into the studio with a bag of drugs large enough to rival their egos, emerging after too long a pause with an introspective, self-absorbed mess of an album. A couple of teasers had whetted our appetites—2006’s GT HD and 2007’s GT: Prologue —but it would be a full six years between GT4 and the mess of Gran Turismo 5

Yes, the PS3 was notoriously difficult to develop for, at least at first. But when your development team keeps going back to re-render the Nurburgring because the graffiti had changed, well, it might be time for an intervention. Four out of five cars in GT5 were ported over from GT4, and they looked terrible. The AI had deteriorated with successive games and could now be called artificial but not really intelligent in any sense. The game’s UI was beyond frustrating. Despite this, it still looked better than Forza Motorsport 3, and I gave it the nod when it came to how the cars handled. Patches and an update arrived, but once Forza Motorsport 4 pulled up to the grid, my PS3 sat gathering dust.

The team at Polyphony Digital was going to need to pull the stops out with GT6 to win me back, and I’m happy to tell you that as far as I’m concerned, that’s just what it has done.

Drivers, start your engines

Despite the fact that Sony’s gaming headlines are dominated by the new PS4 console, GT6 is a PS3 game. Given the inflexibility associated with being a launch title and Polyphony Digital’s tortured relationship with deadlines, this decision makes a lot of sense. It also makes direct comparisons with Forza Motorsport 5 somewhat difficult, a fact that works in both games' favor in some ways.

The first thing you’ll notice on the home screen is the redesigned UI: It’s clean, it’s intuitive, and it’s fast. Almost everything lives on this page: your cars; online, arcade, and career modes; the car dealerships; tuning and customization; some special races; and photo mode. It’s a simple, snappy left-to-right scroll that's very welcome.

You only have the option of buying a single car at first: a Honda Fit. Fear not, though—once you’ve spent the requisite credits on this little grocery getter, every other car in the game becomes available to buy, as long as you’ve got the requisite credits. That means there's no more need to repeatedly check to see if the model you need to complete a series has shown up in the now-defunct used car dealership.

And are there a lot of cars! Over 1,200 now, all of which have been rendered to the same standard as GT5’s premium cars. That detail only applies to the exteriors, though; the majority still have the same generic cockpit views as GT5’s standard cars after the title update. This would annoy me more if I didn't generally play the game using the behind-the-bumper camera, which I still think provides the best experience. I’m prepared to accept that some people will disagree.

In truefashion, that 1,200 car lineup does include quite a few that will seem almost identical to all but the most committed otaku. There are 34 different varieties of Honda (and Acura) NSX and 27 different S2000s, for example, despite the fact that neither car changed very much over their model lives. But there are some gems in there: Gordon Murray’s Light Car Company Rocket joins his iconic McLaren F1, Elon Musk’s Model S is present (which should make Senior Reviews Editor and Chief Tesla Fan Lee Hutchinson very happy ), and of course my beloved Ford Ka is there. The tuning restrictions that previously afflicted the ported cars no longer apply either, but the somewhat irritating paint system carries over from GT5, and custom liveries in the vein of Forza are still left to our wish lists.