Gran Turismo began as a simple ambition to create the perfect driving simulator; now, it’s evolved into one of the most successful video game series ever, and a social movement in its own right. Esquire caught up with Kazunori Yamauchi as he put the finishing touches to the latest chapter.
In a quiet backstreet of Tokyo’s Koto district stands a nondescript office building, its plain façade and modest signage giving little away as to the type of business conducted above its white-tiled lobby. Up on the second floor hides the headquarters of Polyphony Digital, a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc (SCEI). It is the developing studio responsible for Gran Turismo, the most accurate driving series ever to grace a games console, and — with more than 56m copies sold - one of the primary contributors to the success of Sony’s PlayStation.
The series’ latest iteration, Gran Turismo 5, has taken five years to complete (some 27 months longer than initially anticipated) and cost around £38m to develop. It has been mooted that it will sell as many copies as Lady Gaga’s debut album (12m, give or take), only it will retail for four times as much - with a limited-edition version costing twice as much again.
Right now - which is to say, just after lunch on a Tuesday in late September - the floor is eerily quiet. It is the calm before the proverbial gale. Most of the employees are power-napping, either at home or in one of the four “hotel” rooms adjoining the far wall, or simply lying under their desks before their next shift begins in earnest. The only discernible sound is the gentle buzz emanating from the neon-lit servers occupying the centre-point of the office. Housing one of the most powerful computer clusters in Tokyo (no mean feat, that), the sealed area has its own preset cooling system. Hence, the blinking mainframe shares its secure storage bay with several crates of Veuve Clicquot.
Towards the back of the main office - past the piles of suitcases, reams of manufacturers’ paint samples and auto manuals and, inexplicably, a boxed George W Bush doll - is the recreation room, a double-height library crammed with car magazines, DVDs, massage chairs, keyboards, guitars, a kitchen and a treadmill. It is uninhabited save for a lone figure who sits reading, a fresh coffee at his. This is Kazunori Yamauchi, president of Polyphony Digital and creator of Gran Turismo. He smiles and rises to greet me.
Gran Turismo is a rare beast: a video game that’s popular with non-gamers. Its re-creation of a realistic driving environment with real-life car marques and models has endeared it to a worldwide audience of automobile buffs, young and old, male and female. The PlayStation-only game has spawned 13 official titles and spin-offs, and a host of lesser imitators engineered by rival software houses. At its heart, it is a driving game in which you compete to win money to collect more powerful, race-tuned cars.
“It is a game and it is a simulator,” Yamauchi explains, “but it’s definitely also something else. I sort of consider Gran Turismo to be a movement.”
This credo - of an unofficial club of like-minded individuals, fuelled by a passion for driving - is reflected in the series’ other unusual offering: its ability to improve your real-world road-handling skills. Its complex and realistic physics mean that gamers have to adhere to the laws of driving to succeed. Pinpoint braking times, clutch control and driving lines are the route to glory in this game - there are no cheat codes or predetermined button combinations: no shortcuts to the chequered flag.
In 2005, Jeremy Clarkson - a self-professed fan of the series - attempted, on an episode of Top Gear, to beat a lap time he’d set in the game at the Laguna Seca raceway in California. (His genuine attempt, at the wheel of a Honda NSX, proved to be 16 seconds short.) Yamauchi has since expressed his regard for the BBC show by including Top Gear’s Dunsfield Aerodrome circuit as a drivable track in Gran Turismo 5.
As we relocate to a bank of sofas= in Polyphony’s reception, I ask Yamauchi where this passion for all things four-wheeled originated. “Our family dealt in fine china, ceramics, that kind of thing,” he reflects. “In Japan, a fine china merchant would usually go from house to house. When I was three, I would often be the passenger in my father’s car, going with him on his deliveries to our customers. It was just natural for me to see the other cars on the road through the window. Children pick things up very quickly, and I soon learned the names of all the cars.”
He once wanted to be the next Jean-Henri Fabre - the French entomologist who inspired Charles Darwin. “I would read his books from cover to cover every day,” he says. Could Fabre’s fastidious attention to detail in recording nature have motivated the way he catalogues cars? “I never thought about it, but yes, that’s probably where this drive for detail began.”
Yamauchi was at school when he first established a rough concept for Gran Turismo. “I wanted to drive something real,” he remembers.“ That meant using existing cars, and the driving feeling and being real.” The initial problem when he graduated was convincing others of his huge vision. Sony recognised potential in him, but he wasn’t about to be granted the backing for such a grand project. So he focused on developing a game that would get him one step closer to his goal. The result was 1994’s Motor Toon Grand Prix, a cartoon-like outing in the vein of Nintendo’s Mario Kart, which was one of PlayStation’s launch titles. Although visually appealing to children (its Wacky Races-like characters include a spoiled princess and a bunch of Mafiosi penguins), its underlying driving physics appealed to adults.
The game was a success, and Yamauchi was given the green light to proceed with his bigger ambition. The first Gran Turismo took five years to realise, comprised 180 cars and 11 race tracks and sold 10.85m copies. “That was a major challenge,” he admits. “In that five years - it still hasn’t changed all that much - I hardly ever went home, and we had a very small team working very hard to finish it. It was a time period in which spring, summer, autumn, winter would simply roll by.”
In 1998, he founded Polyphony Digital with a team of just 10 employees. Now he has around 110, although this hasn’t eased his work/ life balance. Yamauchi’s routine typically involves 24 hours at his desk, followed by nine hours’ down time. “I operate on a 33-hour day,” he laughs. Relaxation, he adds, is fulfilled by reading voraciously. “It’s been like that since I was 10.”
The latest GT outing, released this month, will be the biggest yet. “I think people will feel like they’re taking on the unknown,” Yamauchi says. “It won’t be just about the graphics or the physics - I think they’re going to have an experience in which they see the true potential of this thing they’re playing with.” The game offers over 1,000 cars, some 70 tracks, the ability to take on 15 other players simultaneously online and - in keeping with the times - full 3D gameplay.
“I’ve seen Gran Turismo 5 running in 3D and it is stunning,” enthused Andrew Oliver, chief technical officer of British developer Blitz Games Studios, earlier this year. “It is a major step forward. It is gaming’s Avatar.”
Another addition is car damage. In the past, manufacturers balked at the idea of players being able to rough up their prized designs. But in GT5, you can T-bone a Ferrari if you please. This has, of course, added to his team’s workload. The 3D-modelling of each car takes six months and now has to include the underside of each chassis - should you roll your Nissan GT-R while cornering hard on Piccadilly Circus.
If his games are unorthodox, so too is his company. Although Polyphony is a subsidiary of SCEI, it has been awarded complete autonomy from its parent, and yet it is still relied upon to deliver to a deadline. Does this daunt him? “I never really worry about that kind of pressure,” he says. “The first GT took five years to create, at which time there were no promises, no deadlines, and I was able to achieve something that I was finally satisfied with, that was received very well by users all over. Because I had that experience at the beginning of my career, my confidence is unwavering.” This is why he has taken as long as he’s needed to nurture GT5 to completion: realism and attention to detail being the watchwords of the series’ unquestionable popularity.
As for his management style, Yamauchi describes himself as both a game player and a manager. “The core members in the company haven’t changed in the last 10 years. I guess it’s sort of an experiment, as I didn’t take into account any examples of other companies or other systems of management. We really just take every issue as it comes.” He is also one of the more down-to-Earth CEOs I have encountered. Asked what his proudest moment is, he suggests a karaoke triumph when he was six.
It is uplifting too, that - unlike certain rivals - he is not blindly sycophantic about the platform for which he develops. “Software has to be created under the restriction of the hardware,” he says. “With each new PlayStation, the vessel has become bigger, but it’s still not enough. With GT5, we’ve made it as clean and beautiful as possible within the confines of the space we’re given, but of course there’s a lot more that we want to put in.”
Our interview is drawing to a close. There’s a project to finish after all, final checks to be carried out, tiny imperfections to be remedied. I ask Yamauchi what he would like his legacy to be. He considers the question at length. “Even if the product itself is forgotten, if the movement that involves GT leaves a mark in history, I think I’d be very happy.”
Outside the GT project, he has been involved with the design of dashboard displays, body kits, even a whole concept car (the stunning “GT by Citroën”
. He has also sat down with the Red Bull racing team to design “the fastest car on Earth”. Oh, and he’s now a bona fide racing driver, too, picking up trophies at the famous Nürburgring 24 Hours race in Germany. Does he have any driving tips for Esquire readers, either in the game or on the road (the two appear increasingly interchangeable)? “Spend more money improving your driving technique than on the car itself. I think this will help you lead a much more fulfilling life.” He grins. “I guess that’s not very good for your magazine’s car advertising. Maybe your editor should cut that part out.”
A succession of audible blips betrays that someone, somewhere in the building, has just started a race. I ask Yamauchi what he plans to do at the week’s close, when the final “code” (the term attributed to a game prior to its release) is handed over to be burned onto discs and then retailed the world over. “There are a lot of things that we couldn’t put in this time,” he sighs, “so we’ll probably just continue making the game. Completing one piece of work - in this case, GT5 - really connects to the motivation to make the next one.”
What Yamauchi has achieved through Gran Turismo is probably best summed up, aptly enough, by certain famous car advertising slogans. “The relentless pursuit of perfection”, for one, or “The ultimate driving machine”. Or better still, “Once driven, forever smitten”.
This article appears in the December issue of Esquire Magazine.
Gran Turismo 5 (Sony/Polyphony Digital)
is out in December on PS3
