Features
Gran Turismo: console king
With TG's test track coming to GT5, we take a look through the history of our favourite Playstation series
In the corner of the Top Gear office sits a battered Playstation 2, an equally battered force-feedback wheel and racing seat, and a pile of disks stacked precariously high.
We are, we confess, racing game geeks. We've tried them all, and grown fond of plenty: Project Gotham, Test Drive Unlimited, the McRae series. But there's always been one undisputed king: Gran Turismo.
At the risk of sounding like a cheesy promotional campaign, Gran Turismo is quite simply the greatest series of driving games ever created. Easy to pick up but realistic enough to keep you coming back, and back, and back, the GT series is estimated to have been responsible for some two million hours of wasted time in the Top Gear office alone.
'The Gran Turismo series has shifted over 47 million unit. That's even more than the Toyota Corolla...'
The original Gran Turismo was released in 1997 upon an innocent public just coming to terms with the technical complexity of Pong and Space Invaders.
But GT changed all that. In the last decade, we've seen four full versions of Gran Turismo and a host of special editions, which in total have sold - ready for this? - over 47 million copies. That's even more units than the Toyota Corolla, which has been around for 40 years.
Why has Gran Turismo proved so popular? Take GT4: over 700 cars and more than 50 tracks, including a beautifully rendered Nurburgring Nordschliefe which has been officially designated the Top Gear virtual proving ground.
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