The main man behind the highly anticipated PS3 racing simulator, Gran Turismo 5 has said that the game is still 90% finished in its development cycle. In an interview with insideline.com, he said that a team of 140 are working on the game.
“Gran Turismo 5 is about 90 percent finished,” Kazunori-san told Inside Line in an exclusive interview. “There are currently around 140 people working on the project.”
Whats very strange is back at the start of the year, he said exactly the same thing in an interview with USA Today (that the game was 90% finished) so what has he been doing for the last 4 months?. At this present time, no release date has been set for the game since it’s delay from its previous scheduled release of March.
The full interview with insideline.com is below –
Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of the extraordinarily successful Gran Turismo franchise, has revealed more details about its fifth iteration, which has been subject to extraordinary delays. Originally scheduled to be launched in March, its introduction has now been pushed until later in the year (last we heard it was like November or December).
“Gran Turismo 5 is about 90 percent finished,” Kazunori-san told Inside Line in an exclusive interview. “There are currently around 140 people working on the project.”
The developer claimed the driving simulator would not be released until it “satisfied everyone’s wishes and then exceeded them.” He admitted that not everything he had hoped for will be included in the game but wouldn’t elaborate on what was missing. Instead, he insisted that GT5 marked the most significant step forwards since the original game was launched in 1997 and that the introduction of online gaming had, “dramatically changed the way the game is designed.”
Kazunori-san was speaking at the Snetterton Circuit in the UK, where he was attending the final of the 2010 GT Academy, a competition run by Sony and Nissan in Europe to turn ‘virtual’ gamers into real life racers. Over a million people originally entered the online time trial and after a series of additional heats, Jordan Tresson (pictured above left with Kazunori) from France has been declared the overall winner. He will now race a 420-horsepower Nissan 370Z GT4 in the 2010 European GT Cup Series. (GT Planet has good video coverage of competitors driving race-prepped 370Zs — real ones — at the academy.)
This is a concept of which Kazunori-san is particularly proud and he’s keen to run a similar competition in the U.S. All we’ve gotten thus far, you’ll remember, is an online time trial competition, with a couple spectator tickets to the Indy 500 the grand prize.
“Normally, video games are a closed genre,” he said. “If you are good at a golf or soccer game, it does not mean you can be a pro golfer or soccer player, but Gran Turismo is different. If you are really good at Gran Turismo, you can be a really good racecar driver.”
As if to prove the point, Kazunori-san recently completed a four-hour race in a Lexus IS-F at the Nurburgring Nordschleife in preparation for his entry into the Nurburgring 24 Hours race on May 15-16.
The Gran Turismo franchise has now sold over 53 million copies worldwide and Kazunori-san explained that his original inspiration was his father’s 1967 Nissan Skyline. His first car was a 1982 Toyota Corolla, which belonged to an ex-girlfriend. Then in 1993 he bought a R32 Skyline GT-R, which he tuned to 320 horsepower and fitted with a quick-shift gearbox.
“But I had a high-speed spin and the front of the car disintegrated,” he admitted. Today his personal garage features an R35 Nissan GT-R, a Honda S2000 and a Ford GT. — Alistair Weaver, Contributor
Thanks again to insideline.com for the original article.
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