What’s the difference between real-world performance driving and Gran Turismo?  How does the virtual experience measure up to the real thing?  These questions have long-haunted forum discussions, and finding the answer usually requires a fair bit of debate.  Of course, you can only accurately compare the two with a healthy dose of maturity and extensive experience with both – making relative comments sometimes difficult to find on the Internet.

Aside from a few seconds of screen time in the rolling credits at the end of each game, few people aside from Kazunori Yamauchi get much credit for the countless hours of hard work that goes into each masterpiece of the Gran Turismo series. True, Polyphony Digital is a very secretive company – that’s just a fact of life in their industry – but there are hundreds of brilliant people getting their hands dirty (and sleeping on cots under their desks) who deserve more credit for what they do.  A single web page on Polyphony Digital’s corporate site offers the rare opportunity to place faces with names.  Thanks to the magic of online translation, let’s take a closer look at who they are.  GTPlanet wishes all of them well – keep up the great work, guys, we are looking forward to what you have in store for us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY0MGB1OO4A

Looking for a new job?  If you’ve got a background in marketing and a passion for Gran Turismo, you might want to consider applying for this position with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeXaKFWg9NE

The Guinness World Records releases annual “Gamer’s Edition” books, which rate and document some of the more dramatic feats in the world of video games.  However, Guinness is branching out from the objective realm of records and numbers into the subjective world of opinion and “expert judging panels”.  One of the products of this ideological shift is a ranking of “The Top 50 Console Games of All Time“, and the results are raising a few eyebrows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCpsr3C4_n0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNQJ1T0DJrM

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