Gran Turismo 5

You’ve probably seen Sony’s recent marketing campaigns featuring “vice president” Kevin Butler (played by actor Jerry Lambert) talking about the company’s latest first-party titles. His most recent clip focuses on Sony’s latest kart racing game Mod Nation Racers, but at the end he mentions his “next project – let’s just say it’s a little racing game that rhymes with ‘man furismo jive'” with a knowing look – understandably raising quite a few eyebrows in our forums and around the web.

This isn’t so much “breaking news” as it is “peace of mind”: Sony has prominently featured GT5 on its special E3 2010 website (click and drag the page to view the top left corner). This is, of course, a pleasant change from last year, when Sony actually requested the press not ask Yamauchi about the big game during interviews for what are now obvious reasons. E3 kicks off with Sony’s press conference at 11:30 AM PST on June 15th. As always, I’ll have everything you need to know right here, updated by the minute on the (hopefully) big day…

In what is presumably the last of Kazunori Yamauchi’s round of interviews to emerge from his time at Snetterton, he’s made a comment regarding the development status of the big game:

You can put any doubts you had about Gran Turismo 5’s 3D support to rest. Taku Imasaki, a U.S. based producer for the game, confirmed that it will feature this new technology.

During his time at Snetterton to watch the two GT Academy 2010 finalists compete for the top spot, Kazunori Yamauchi talked with quite a few journalists. His last interview to be published is with BBC’s TopGear. As you would expect, there aren’t any bombshells, but here’s the most notable quotes:

One of the more unpleasant surprises we’ve had waiting for Gran Turismo 5 was the unexpected postponement of the game’s March 2010 Japanese release. It was a quiet announcement, but set a somber tone at the beginning of the year for us eager fans. Since that time, we have not received any sort of information on exactly why that happened – until now. In an excellent interviewwith Dean Gibson of AutoExpress last weekend, Yamauchi-san clarified things a little bit:

If you’re reading this site, you probably know Gran Turismo 5 is a big deal for the PlayStation brand, but we can’t often quantify that into numbers. Data collected by marketing research agency OTX GamePlan, however, gives a peek into stats you know Sony is taking into careful consideration. According to their latest survey, 33% of people who plan on purchasing GT5 don’t yet own a PlayStation 3 console to play it on. In other words, if GT5 sells anywhere close to GT4’s 10.9 million copies, there will have to be several million consoles out the door along with it. For a system that sells around 10 million units per year, that would be healthy increase. Without a solid release date for the game, though, those consoles could be sitting on the shelf for a while…