GT5 Madrid Launch Party

I was fortunate enough to attend the Gran Turismo 5 launch party in Madrid last November and, though I took lots of photos, I didn’t have any good video to share. Fortunately, before the festivities kicked off, I met up with InsideSimRacing’s European correspondent Andreas Nie, who captured plenty of great footage at the event and around the city. After the press session, I sat down with Andreas to talk about the event and my personal first impressions of the game. It’s all in ISR’s latest video feature, published yesterday and embedded above.

The Red Bull X1 prototype in Gran Turismo 5 made the jump from pixels to (partial) reality when it was unveiled to the world at the game’s international launch party in Madrid. I had a chance to personally inspect the model at the event, and its construction was very impressive (take a look at my up-close-and-personal photos from the event below, including partial disassembly of the model after the party was over). It was built by prototyping specialists IDC Models, and they’ve shared an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the X1’s construction along with their official press release. Nice work, guys – let’s hope this inspires Red Bull to take another step forward in development of the car!

I don’t have any specific updates about the GT5 disc revealed yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped quite a few interesting tidbits from bubbling up around the world. First up, word from “distribution sources” indicate more than half a million copies of Gran Turismo 5 are headed to France. More specifically, there will be 450,000 standard copies, 100,000 Collector’s Editions, and 5,000 Signature Editions available in the country. (Amazon.fr is still taking SE reservations, so hop on that if you’re interested.)