How long did it take to model all the cars?
Yamauchi: A designer spends roughly 6 months in average. 50 cars are 300 months. That's 25 years. The tracks are a lot more work. It's longer than a year each. We have 30 people working on the tracks.
In GT and GT2, both for PS1, a designer spent a day to model a car. In GT3 and GT4, for PS2, the same worker spent a month modeling the same care due to the increased amount of polygons. In GT5 for PS3, they require 6 months to do the same job.
We're before something immensely detailed. It's a lot of work. We could consider and I'd like to think Gran Turismo is like the benchmark, the acid test, to measure the limit of each console generation. At this point, I'd like to show the limits of Gran Turismo itself, or else we couldn't call it Gran Turismo. At least I could not. It's a great responsibility.
Regarding realism, when will we see car damage?
Yamauchi: Right now we're testing this. We will see car damage in GT5. There are three problems to solve though. Firstly, some car manufacturers don't care to see damage in their cars but others would never allow that. Some cars will be damaged and others won't, depending on the manufacturer. Secondly, the simulation. In Daytona Speedway, for instance, going slightly sideways when getting out of the banked curve and entering the straight section and hitting slightly the rear part of our car against the sides of the track will make our car become utter junk. Game over. It's a small mistake, but physics calculations tell us we'd undergo a 150 G force. That equals death. The car is literally disintegrated. We do not want that. We do not want to destroy the cars. I don't like that. That's ultrarealistic simulation, but if it happens, the game is over, you lose your car. I'm resisting to accept that kind of effect. Right now we're looking into how to make pure simulation and these kind of situations be compatible with each other. And the third problem, the fact that many driving games out there feature this kind of accidents, but I've never seen one which actually provide something positive or are perfect from a technical standpoint. I've got to think a lot about it yet, but I understand the series supporters do want damage and accidents because, for the better or worse, they're an integral part of reality.