Gran Turismo: all referrals

Gran Turismo

Gran Turismo 7 has been postponed to 2022 due to production difficulties related to the pandemic, which has caused slowdowns in the development of the game over the last few months. But the one related to the debut episode for the Polyphony Digital series on PlayStation 5 is just the latest in a series that has always characterized the saga.

Honors and charges

The Gran Turismo series, we certainly do not find out now, has been important in all these years for its contribution to car driving games on consoles, both in terms of realism and quality. Therefore, the certainty that one of the most loved and sold series in the history of video games will land on PlayStation 5, has in recent months fueled the dreams and hopes of those who follow it with passion since the beginning back in 1997, when the first Gran Turismo on PlayStation immediately made understand to everyone that that brand would soon become "important" in the world videogame panorama. In fact, that game showed the world at that time an unprecedented level of quality and detail for the genre.

Two hundred cars, a realistic and avant-garde driving system for the times, driving licenses to win and then participate in events, cash prizes to buy the most exclusive cars or spare parts to improve performance, and a control system with full support for the DualShock, quickly decreed the triumph of critics and audiences. A success repeated two years later by Gran Turismo 2 and, in 2001, by Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec on PlayStation 2, where the series pushed its foot even further on the accelerator of realism thanks to a more powerful hardware than the previous one.

But for those who work on an increasingly famous saga and constantly in the spotlight, at a certain point it can be difficult to match the expectations of the public and the publisher on the one hand, and the normal ones on the other. development times. In fact, with each episode the public expects the maximum, the publisher for its part wants to monetize and presses for the months of work to be reduced, while the authors want to be able to develop their products in the best possible way, and only come out when these are 100 complete. % and ideally well optimized. Thus, when trying to speed up production to find a meeting point for the needs of the three parties involved, the risk that something goes wrong, even more so, is always around the corner.

The record of Gran Turismo 5

The "tradition" of postponements of the saga was inaugurated by Gran Turismo 4, whose release on the market was initially set for the month of December 2003. After a series of jokes shutdown during the previous six months, the game was eventually released just a year later, in December 2004, among other things lacking a previously announced important feature, namely the online mode (which will later be added in Gran Tourism 4 Online test version). Polyphony Digital, however, decided to make fans' waiting less bitter by publishing Gran Turismo 4 Prologue, a scaled-down version of the original game, which provided a preview of the future of the series, and tried to placate the hearts of fans, disappointed and angry for the postponement.

But the one-year postponement of Gran Turismo 4 was nothing compared to what would later happen with Gran Turismo 5: if GT4 started the "tradition" of GT postponements, it is " he "the one who" consecrated it "to the point of being able to" boast "the unenviable record, namely that of being" one of the most postponed games "in history. The title was in fact announced for the first time at E3 in Los Angeles in 2005, but with the name of Vision Gran Turismo. In fact, the project was not yet the GT5 that would be known years later, but a sort of transposition on PlayStation 3 of Gran Turismo 4 for PlayStation 2 with more cars, tracks and material rendered by the PC. The goal of the development team (and Sony) was to include it in the PlayStation 3 launch line-up, which would later take place on November 11, 2006. But something went wrong and the product suddenly lost all track.

According to rumors the game had been postponed due to some minor technical hitches in the last weeks of development. The well-informed, however, argued that these were minor problems, solvable within a maximum of a few weeks, so as to make Gran Turismo 5 available in early 2007, perhaps at the European launch of PlayStation3 in March. But none of this happened and in fact, every decision was postponed to the end of the year. In December 2007 Gran Turismo 5 slipped again, and the release date was indicated approximately for Christmas 2008: for the fans it was a blow, also because then the game did not come out even then. At a certain point in the project the traces were lost again, until it reappeared a bit surprisingly with a trailer during a Sony press conference at E3 in Los Angeles in 2009.

Another postponement

To have a new official date it was therefore necessary to wait for the Tokyo Game Show 2009, when Kazunori Yamauchi and Polyphony Digital revealed that GT5 would arrive in stores by the following March. But at the beginning of 2010, however, a postponement still came: the European division of Sony however specified that the delay of Gran Turismo 5 on the initial plans was related only to the Japanese market, adding that the release in Europe would be announced at due time. The driving simulator would therefore delay "only" a few months on the original plans and on the Japanese market. Reason? For some, the creators of the series were dissatisfied with the results compared to their desire to "give gamers the perfect driving experience", while others, including Sony spokesman Makiko Noda, were only of "production issues".

Whatever the real reasons for that further delay had been, it was still several weeks before we got back concrete news about the project. Weeks in which rumors of further postponements and even a sudden cancellation. But they were only inferences, probably the result of the paradoxical situation created by the continuous delays and due to the fear of fans of never seeing the game live. Doubts were swept away in this sense during E3 2010, when Gran Turismo 5 was officially confirmed in North America and Latin America for November 2, 2010, in Europe, Japan on November 3, and November 4 in Australia. It finally seemed done, and fans could begin to really hope for real after years of waiting.

Instead, weeks later the unthinkable happens: on 13 October 2010 another cold shower arrived for them: the title was in fact postponed again, even if for a month, officially to "take advantage" of the Christmas period . Postponement after postponement, Gran Turismo 5 was eventually released a little earlier, on November 24, 2010, after five years of work and an estimated total production expense of around $ 60 million. From a certain point of view it went better a few years later with Gran Turismo 6, officially presented on May 15, 2013 at the Silverstone Circuit, on the occasion of the celebrations for the 15th anniversary of the series, and released in time for that holiday season. year. But luckily this time things went well and the date was met.

Gran Turismo Sport

Gran Turismo Sport will take care of the old habits again. In 2013, Kazunori Yamauchi claimed that the new episode of Gran Turismo would arrive on the PlayStation 4 probably "in a year or two" from the current one. But things did not go exactly like this: the product was officially announced at Paris Games Week 2015 with the title of Gran Turismo Sport, complete with an official launch date for November 15th of the following year. But just a few weeks later, on August 30, 2016, it was postponed to a later date, apart from a generic 2017. Polyphony Digital's ambitious new work seems to need more time to "further refine some features", as the historic creator announced. of the series, Kazunori Yamauchi, through a statement that appeared on the PlayStation Blog.

"As the release date, set for November, got closer," wrote the game director, "we realized that we needed more time to perfect GT Sport, to which we had devoted all our energy since the announcement of the game, and we didn't want to compromise in the very final stages. Although at the moment we cannot confirm a new release date, we are giving our all to make GT Sport the best game in the Gran Turismo series ever. " With all due respect to Sony, which in the meantime was forced to reimburse anyone who had booked the game on the PlayStation Store. Between canceled betas and the new release date, many fans still welcomed the possibility of at least being able to find the game in demo form at the Tokyo Games Show 2016.

In the end, about a year into distance from the original date set for the launch, Gran Turismo Sport was released in stores around the world in October 2017, lacking the previously announced full support for Sony's virtual reality headset, and not exactly welcomed by the press and especially by fans. who criticized it because of a lack of content, an excessive propensity for online gaming and a lack of modernization in some of the components of the gameplay. But that's another story. In short, as you have read, the postponement of Gran Turismo 7 is only the latest act of a "tradition" inaugurated many years ago by Polyphony Digital, and we as always hope that this change of program will really help us then have a chapter of GT worthy of its fame.