So it took a long time to develop,” he says. “That made it so that the responsibility of each team member was very big and the workload was very big as well. In the beginning, the team was only five-strong, including Yamauchi, and even at the end of development, less than 20 were working on it. In total, it took Yamauchi and his team five years to complete, a development span that at the time was almost unheard of. Gran Turismo wouldn’t be released in Japan until December 1997. “He had a charm and charisma to make people believe that he and the team can accomplish an impossible-looking task at that time.” “I remember how he approached coders working on 3D graphics and car physics engines who had regularly written articles in a specialized magazine, and convinced them to join his team to build his dream project,” remembers Yoshida, who ended up joining the Gran Turismo team as studio manager and co-producer. “I was able to secure the trust of the executives to create games on my own, and that’s when I presented the Gran Turismo project to them and development officially started.” It soon gained a strong following and, predictably, there were calls for a sequel. Releasing in mid-December 1994, two weeks after PlayStation’s Japanese launch, it was a colorful karting game but its cartoon stylings were powered by sophisticated 3D graphics and physics. “We secured the budget for creating Motor Toon Grand Prix and we pushed the project forward, but in the background we’d actually already started the development of Gran Turismo.”īut that didn’t mean Motor Toon Grand Prix was half-baked. “What I did was to start a project in the racing game genre that was easier to understand for the executives,” he says. The executives didn’t take him up on the driving simulator, but Yamauchi had a plan. Why Yamauchi-san made Motor Toon Grand Prix “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. What he really wanted to do was to make a realistic driving simulator. It was really just wireframe graphics, but that was the time when I first really took an interest in 3D graphics.” “At the time, personal computers were brand-new and my hobby was to make games on them. “I first took interest in realtime 3D when I was around the third year in junior high school, probably around 1983,” he says. Having cut his teeth making 2D games for the 16bit era, he saw a chance to make something in which he’d been interested for many years. Yamauchi was very interested in the hardware capabilities of the PlayStation console. “I remember he even offered to playtest prototype PlayStation controllers using students of his father’s school.” Why Yamauchi wanted to make a game for PlayStation “He had a lot of ideas and made input into the design of PlayStation and the original PlayStation controller,” Yoshida says. Yoshida was tasked with helping to form the software line-up for SIE’s first console, and he found Yamauchi a great source of help. “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 Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios today. And one day he met a young business planner called Shuhei Yoshida, who had just joined the PlayStation development team led by Ken Kutaragi. When he began his work on PlayStation’s 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.īack in 1993, over a year before PlayStation was launched in Japan, Yamauchi was a producer for Sony Music Entertainment’s small videogame development team. Kazunori Yamauchi wasn’t meant to be making Gran Turismo.
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