“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.
...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.”
