GTPlanet

It’s taken a surprisingly long amount of time for word on the latest GT Awards winner to get out, but IGN is first to break cover and confirm the winner: a 1970 Ford Mustang with a 427 SOHC “Cammer” engine. The car is a mean-yet-classy addition to Gran Turismo, carefully pieced together by Philip Koenen and Grand Touring Garage in Oregon for a “Hong Kong client” after a long search for the right body and engine. The powerplant is particularly special: considered one of the best Ford has ever built, it produces 616 hp at 7000 rpm and 515 lbs/ft of torque at 3800 rpm.

Other finalists included a Scion tC with a very, very interesting front-mounted wing, a Camaro SS stuffed with carbon fiber, and an upgraded, twin-turbo Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4, though none were able to capture Yamauchi’s attention like the ‘Stang. Watch for it next spring in Gran Turismo 5!

UPDATE (Nov. 7):  New pictures of the other finalists and awards ceremony added to the gallery below.

Yamauchi’s latest interview with AutoWeek magazine has quite a few surprises, with Yamauchi going so far as to confirm GT5’s development cost and a controversial new feature. Keep reading for a quick summary of everything you need to know…

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It’s time for the 7th annual Gran Turismo Awards at the SEMA show in Las Vegas! As you may recall, this unique event is a big deal for GT fans and car tuners alike, as Yamauchi picks his favorite car from the show to be featured in the next GT game. Award winners from previous years have brought us some of the series’ most memorable and cars, including the 1962 Buick Special (’03 winner) in Gran Turismo 4 and the 1960 Art Morrison Chevrolet Corvette (’06 winner) in GT5 Prologue.

This year will be a little different, though, as Sony has just announced that the 2007 and 2008 award winners (HPA Motorsport’s Audi TT and JR Rocha’s Infiniti G37) will be playable in a fresh new Gran Turismo 5 demo on the show floor. Kazunori Yamauchi himself will, of course, be on hand to personally select the 2009 winner, so we should also expect several new interviews popping up in the coming week.

On a considerably more somber note, it has just come to my attention (via Chronos in the forums), that JR Rocha, the personal owner of the 2008 award-winning Infiniti G37, passed away just last month from a heart attack. Presumably, SEMA 2009 would have been his first chance to play his own car in the game, making this turn of events all the more tragic. We’ve lost a great automotive enthusiast and car designer – may he rest in peace, and may his creation live on forever in GT5.

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Kazunori Yamauchi’s latest interview with ComputerBild.de may not drop any bombshells, but it definitely warrants a closer look. Google’s automated translation is a bit rough, so I’ve picked out the high points for you:

- When asked why GT5 is taking so long, Yamauchi reiterates the game is “difficult to develop”, and “the dimensions of the game are huge, it is simply too great. It is so complex, so vast in its scale”.

- There is pressure from Sony to deliver a high quality game, and the team at Polyphony Digital understand the implications of their work – it has potential to move many PlayStation 3 consoles for the company.

- Physics, sound, and online-features will be Gran Turismo 5’s greatest contributions to the evolution of the GT series.

- Once again, damage which has been seen so far is not indicative of the “final product”. He admits the game will not be able to portray more severe accidents, but they’re still working to make it as “realistic as possible”.

Yamauchi’s most interesting responses come when the interviewer inquires (and continues to press) on dynamic weather and time-of-day functionality…

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Sometimes, you’ll come across the most pleasant surprises when you least expect them, and this situation is no exception. Today, we get our first look at the Gran Turismo 5 box art and packaging, in the hands of Kazunori Yamauchi himself. Our own sharp-eyed reader, GON, was first to notice the revelation in this new video from Mercedes-Benz and immediately sent it my way. Sure enough, at 0:42, we get to spy on a Polyphony Digital meeting as Yamauchi inspects a thick Blu-Ray box, complete with the obligatory small text, Sony Computer Entertainment stamp, and the new PS3 logo. Although it may not be the ultimate final product, it’s very likely this is exactly what you’ll find on store shelves next year.

The most curious thing, of course, is the fact that the packaging clearly contains three separate Blu-Ray cases -- one black, one red, and one blue. What could they be? While the conspiracy theorists get to work, here’s a list of other interesting tidbits from the clip:

• Gran Turismo uses one single physics calculation model, so they simply enter the parameters for each car, and the handling characteristics play themselves out within the game. As Yamauchi says, “If the original car is made well, it’ll drive well.”
• We get a closer look at the 3D model of the SLS AMG in Gran Turismo 5, along with a corner from the Nurburgring Nordschleife.
• Mercedes’ narrarator suggests that Yamauchi is “considering” putting the new SLS AMG on the cover, but Yamauchi’s following comments (along with the box art seen earlier) all but confirm it will be the star of the show. As he explains, it “will probably be the most exciting car in the world when GT5 is released”. He also was sure to mention: “Fans of Gran Turismo 5 really have something to be excited about”.

If you’d like to grab the original, slightly-higher-quality version of this clip, download it here (.mov, 57.6 MB) -- thanks to those who managed to track it down!

Few franchises in the gaming world can trigger such heated debate as Forza and Gran Turismo. The reason for the rivalry is obvious, with each high-profile game competing for hearts and minds on the front lines of the “console wars”. Up until this year, however, Microsoft’s Turn 10 Studios and Kazunori Yamauchi’s Polyphony Digital worked quietly on their respective titles and delivered driving games of excellent quality for each console. As the online rhetoric of fans begins to heat up, however, that code of silence is beginning to melt away. Here’s what Yamauchi had to say about the competition while speaking with NowGamer just last week:

“[...] I keep my eye on them from a distance. My observations tend to more often than not centre on, ‘Oh, so they’re concentrating extra hard on this’, or ‘oh, so they’re not worried about that’, or ‘they’ve really got a lot of passion for that’. All my observations are first-impression sort of things. I don’t look at the games in too much detail. Just a one-glance observation is good enough. I think about what they’re trying to do, how much time they’re spending, how they’re going about putting the game together, how do they feel about the game as they’re making it… that sort of thing.”

Yamauchi’s comments stand in contrast to what Turn 10’s Creative Director, Dan Greenawalt, said about him at E3 earlier this year:

“We watched the Sony press conference and we were like, OK so we just brought what we believe firmly is the best racing game ever made, and our competition didn’t show up. So now you can see why I’m fairly bullish. I hate to sound so cocky but the truth is the stars have aligned. I don’t know how else to say it.

“Kazunori Yamauchi-san is someone I have tremendous respect for. I have tremendous respect for the work of team, but I am a GT fan. I bought my first car that I stressed out about buying because I played it in Gran Turismo. I’m in this industry because of that game.

“That said, as a fan of the series, he hasn’t done anything for me in years. So in many ways he’s handing the baton to me. He probably doesn’t see it that way, but I do, because I believe that I’m now taking what he ignited in me as a passion, and taking it to a much, much, much broader level. I’m not saying it’s necessarily larger yet, but definitely broader, younger, older, men, women. So I’m really excited.”

And, via Joystiq,

“So, props to Kazunori Yamauchi-san and the PS1 team. That said, I feel that he’s passed us the baton. Perhaps he hasn’t meant to, but we have taken the genre to new levels and they’ve stopped evolving the genre. So again, tremendous respect to him, but I’d say the differentiator is they’re old school. The emperor’s naked, and I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to slap him around, but no game competes [with] us right now.”

…and Xbox360Achievements:

“I play a lot of racing games, including PC racing games and I have not seen anything that is even within years of what we’re delivering here.”

As this war of words plays out, it’s becoming evident that, to Yamauchi, it may not be a “war” at all. As we learn more about him, he appears to view himself as an artist, judging his work by the standards of his own ideals. Likewise, when analyzing the work of his peers, he does not try to compare it to his own – instead, he attempts to understand their interpretation of what a racing game should be, and how their work may have lived up to their own goals.

Heated rhetoric aside, it’s very interesting to see how two very different groups of people approach the same problem. Yamauchi, in his quest for the perfect driving simulation, delivers games of stunning quality. Turn 10, in their pursuit of the GT franchise, introduce innovative new features to differentiate their product in unique and creative ways. Ultimately, it’s a race from which neither will emerge “victorious” over the other, because racing game fans have already won.

Another Kazunori Yamauchi interview hits the web, this time from GameTrailers. Here’s what’s new:

• Entirely new code base from GT4 -- nothing has been carried over from the old game. Even the GT4 Online code was not used to develop the networked side of GT5.
• New physics in the TGS demo should be immediately apparent to anyone playing the game -- it’s actually “easier to drive”, though when the car begins to lose grip, its behavior is more true-to-life.
• Entirely new artificial intelligence. The oval tracks and NASCAR presented a unique AI challenge.

The big question mark, of course, looms over that one little word: “easier”. What that means is still unclear, though it will obviously worry many fans out there who may now fear a less challenging or realistic driving experience. For now, let’s hope the true meaning of Yamauchi’s words were simply lost in translation! Thanks to ComposerRyan for digging this one up.

Japanese gaming mag Famitsu hit news stands this week featuring a fresh interview with Kazunori Yamauchi. He used the opportunity to reiterate GT5’s progress while emphasizing the scale of the game:

“Naturally, my attention is focused purely on Gran Turismo 5 right now. The scale of this title is just dizzying, so daily progress is slow, but it’s still going forward at a steady clip. All the basic stuff is complete, but we’re trying to give everything that little bit extra at present. We could release it any time we want, really, but I want to have that classic GT-style ‘did we really have to go this far?’ feel going. I want to go way beyond gamer expectations.”

Though I have not seen a direct translation of the entire Famitsu interview, 1UP.com did not hesitate to confirm that “you’ll be allowed to bring your entire collection of cars” earned in Gran Turismo PSP over to GT5. We’ve known about the interoperability between the two games for a while now, but nothing as of yet has indicated if all 850 cars in GT PSP will be making the move to GT5. Unless 1UP was being liberal in their translation, it’s beginning to look like a safe bet.

He also discussed his rationale for choosing what car will appear on the cover of each GT game while explaining his choice of the Corvette ZR-1 for GT PSP.

“When I think about what car to put on the cover, I have to figure out which car is considered the coolest at this exact moment in time. The auto industry is going through a transition period right now, and it’s a dangerous time for a lot of companies. It’s a major support of the entire world economy, and the vast amount of talent and output it produces is one reason why GT is what it is. I wanted to go back to the roots with what makes a car cool, so I chose GM’s Corvette ZR-1 to try and cheer the auto industry up a little.”

So, any takers on Gran Turismo 5’s box art next spring…?