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Not everyone is into video games, but the Gran Turismo series, which, according to Sony, is the best-selling game of its PlayStation brand, is worth even nongamers taking a look at because of its level of detail.

I had an opportunity to chat with Kazunori Yamauchi – the racing driver-cum-game designer, now chief executive of Polyphony Digital, which created and continues to develop Gran Turismo for Sony – at the Jalopnik Film Festival opener last week, and he gave me some insight into what it takes to make the game, which he says is more than just an arcade game.

“Gran Turismo is a driving simulator, so playing it will actually make you better at driving real cars,” said Mr. Yamauchi. “We’ve actually had Gran Turismo players become real racecar drivers.”

He is, of course, referring to Lucas Ordóñez, Jordan Tresson and Jann Mardenborough, all Nissan Gran Turismo Academy winners who went on to professional driving careers. Ordóñez competes in Le Mans endurance events, Tresson in the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile World Endurance Championship and Jann Mardenborough in F.I.A. Formula Three races.

To create the game, its design team first had to record visuals, sound and other characteristics from a variety of racecars and tracks.

“For a single track, we take over 100,000 photos and laser scan the track surface, and we also use images captured from helicopters and satellites,” Mr. Yamauchi said. “The discrepancy of track accuracy is down to plus or minus one centimeter. We do the same for cars; we take several hundred photos for each car, laser scan the surface, the exterior, the interior, the instrument panels.”

He said that building a digital recreation of a track took about a year and a car six months. There are about 170 people working on programing and graphics.

The latest version of the game, Gran Turismo 6, is scheduled for release in December and gives players the option to chose from 1,200 cars and more than 70 tracks.

If you’ve never played Gran Turismo before, one of the best (and most expensive) way to get behind the virtual wheel of one of these dream cars is in the home racing seat, which includes a molded racing seat, steering wheel and controls and driving pedals. At nearly $600 on eBay, it isn’t cheap. But it’s certainly less expensive than any of the cars featured in the game, some of which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in real life. Since the release of Gran Turismo 5 in 2010, players have been able to race other players online, leading to an even more authentic experience.

Mr. Yamauchi said that he hoped Gran Turismo would help auto manufacturers find out how best to inform their designs, simply by opening up input to a broader array of people. His latest project is called Vision Gran Turismo.

“It’s creating an excuse for auto manufacturers to design sexy sports cars,” he said. “When we recently went out and asked auto manufacturers to design us a sports car, we got 22 responses. Out of those 22 manufacturers, some of them, like Nike, aren’t auto manufacturers.”

In an age when Red Bull sponsors racing, space exploration and other nonenergy drink-related endeavors, that’s not surprising. But the fact that companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Honda and Toyota are offering to design sports cars for a video game really says something about Gran Turismo’s influence on performance driving. After all, according to Sony, the game has surpassed 70 million in sales since its debut in the late-’90s.

“Gran Turismo isn’t just a video game,” Mr. Yamauchi said. “When you really step back and look at it, it’s more of a movement.”