Before its release, the first Gran Turismo was far too realistic
, by Thibaut
Shuhei Yoshida, the former head of PlayStation Studios, revealed a new tidbit in an interview with PlayStation Inside. The Japanese businessman made a decisive contribution to the first Gran Turismo.
Launched in December 1997 in Japan, the racing simulator put too much emphasis on the simulation side of things. Its creator Kazunori Yamauchi had pushed it to the limit, wanting to apply ultra-realistic driving to the game. When testing a prototype, Yoshida noted that the game was far too demanding, but Yamauchi refused to take his remarks into account.
" It was extremely advanced, perhaps too much so. But at first Kazunori Yamauchi didn’t take my feedback at face value, so he gathered around thirty consumers to test the game. And just as I expected, they all crashed without exception at the first turn, because the gameplay was so difficult. I was at the back of the room with Kazunori Yamauchi, at which point he turned to me and told me I was right, and that’s when he rounded things off and toned down the pure simulation aspect a little to put out the Gran Turismo you know today on PS1."
"In a way, I like to think that I partly saved Gran Turismo’s fate, and that I played a small part in its success!"
Source: playstationinside.fr