Absolutely! But I don’t think many of them spend much time racing online in GTS.
Kind of off topic, but in line with PD employees being into cars. Ever since playing Genki’s Tokyo Extreme Racer series, which is about highway racing on the Shutoku Expressway system in Tokyo, I’ve theorized that some PD employees may have been involved in that scene when it was in its hay day, namely the 90s and early 2000s.
The scene was all about taking skylines, supras, STis, Evos, GTOs, 911s, and more, and making stupid amounts of horsepower to try to go as fast as possible (sounds kind of like GT1, no?).
In the Genki games, there were dozens upon dozens of “teams”, made up of members from all walks of life. In the game, every driver had a made up profile. According to some people in the TXR community, some of these driver profiles were imitations and tributes to real people who were active in the Mid Night Car Special club. There was a number of these driver profiles that stated something along the lines of, “this guy works as a video game designer at a leading studio in downtown Tokyo”. I’ve no idea if any of these low level team member driver profiles are at all imitations of real people, but any of the bosses, both the cars and the profiles, were initiations of real people. The final boss was the Devil Z, which was a real car that raced on the Wangan. The white RX7 was a tribute to RE Amemyia. I can’t rememeber who Emporer was a tribute to, maybe Smokey Nagata?
Now, I have no idea if PD staff were members of the Mid Night Club, but I’d almost guarantee they knew of its existence, and what was going down on the freeways of downtown Tokyo.
PD headquarters, which used to be located on R246 (I don’t remember if it still is, they moved or expanded at some point), is literally like 2 blocks away from one of the branches (the Shinjuku line) of the Shutoku
PD HQ, or was it Sony HQ? Either way, one of them was located on the main straight of the R246 circuit.
Light Blue - Tokyo R246
Upper Yellow - Shinjuku Route
Lower Yellow - Shibuya Route
Green - C1 Loop
Light Green - Yaesu Route
Purple - "New Loop Line", aka Shinkanjo Loop
Blue - Yokohane
Red - The Wangan, aka The Bayshore Route
Edit:
for some reason, two photos won’t work, no idea why. They work fine when I’m editing this post, but as soon as I “Save Edit”, they go back to being X’d out. The first one is a close up of R246, the second one that doesn’t work is a shot zoomed out enough to see the map stretching from Daikoku PA in the south to Tatsumi PA in the north.
Diakoku Futo PA
SSR7 was definitely a simplified tribute to the Wangan. The bridge was styled after the Yokohama Bay Bridge, which is located just south of Daikoku Futo on the Wangan. The style of racing that SSR7 encouraged was basically what was happening on the Bayshore Route in the 90s and early 2000s (side note, Nissan’s famous Bayshore Blue on the R34 GTR is named after the Wangan. Before the R34 was released, the R32 and R33 were basically considered the kings of the Wangan. They also had a colour named Midnight Purple....)
Several of the scapes in GTS feature various sections of the Shutoku. Daikoku PA is the most infamous hangout spot for car culture enthusiasts in Tokyo. The scape labelled “Highway Service/Parking Area” is Tatsumi PA, basically the northern end of the popular route on the Wangan. On those maps, it’s located at the northern intersection of the Wangan and Shinkanjo. Basically people would race/cruise back and forth between Tatsumi PA and Daikoku PA.
The circuit “Tokyo Expressway Central Loop” is styled after the south, west, and east part of the C1 loop.
The circuit “Tokyo Expressway East Loop” is styled after the eastern section of the C1 combined with one of the tunnels on the Wangan near Tokyo Int Airport.
So PD is very much aware of the car culture scene in Tokyo, a large part of which used to be focused around top speed racing on the freeways (back when cop cars had max top speeds, so all you had to do was be faster than the cops lol). Whether or not PD members participated in the illegal racing side of the scene or not, I have no idea, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find out that some of them were at least around, even just watching, in some capacity.
A quick CCW run around the Shinkanjo, starting and ending at Tatsumi PA.
For all we know, Kaz could have been out on the highway that night
(not entirely true, I still love racing vintage cars on classic circuits too).
I made a Gr.3 tribute with the goofy looking skull and crossbones blown up a bit to cover a large portion of the sides with Genki sponsorship. I carried it over from a wrap I made in NFS.
