It's nice -- for gamers -- that Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi has friends in high places in the automotive world.
At Gamescom this week, the veteran designer unveiled the first details of the Vision Gran Turismo project, for which Yamauchi-san approached a number of car companies and renowned car design studios and asked them to submit their dream car concepts that Polyphony Digital would then create in GT6.
He received a host of responses and showed off sketches of them to the media. They ranged from the realistic -- such as Alfa Romeo 6C, a hypothetical 6-cylinder car that would slot in between the 4C and 8C -- to the fantastical, such as the almost Tumbler Batmobile-esque Bertone design.
“Maybe we get a glimpse of the future GT-R...
Other firms that have signed on to participate in Vision Gran Turismo include Alpine, Aston Martin, Audi, BMW, Giugiaro (Ital Design), GM, Honda, Infiniti, Jordan (design by Air Jordan shoemaker Tinker Hatfield), Mercedes-Benz, Nike, Nissan (Yamauchi-san hopes that "maybe we get a glimpse of the future GT-R"), Peugeot, SRT, Volkswagen, and Zagato.
I asked Yamauchi-san if anyone he'd really hoped to get a concept from had turned him down, and he smiled and replied, "We actually haven't been turned down by anyone yet!" He added: "There are actually other companies that have agreed to participate but we are not prepared to make an announcement at this time."
The revered GT boss also introduced several new cars -- the BMW 507 and BMW Z8, the Cizeta, Fisker Karma EcoSport, Ford Focus ST '13, and Pagani Huayra -- as well as a couple of new tracks: Brands Hatch and Apricot Hill, which returns from GT4 and will now support both day and nighttime racing.
Next, Yamauchi-san answered a question about the series' inevitable turn to the PS4. "It'll take at least a minimum of a year" for the next-gen version, and that there is "a good possibility it would be called Gran Turismo 7 by then."
“Everyone had to learn how to optimize systems in order for it to work.
And since GT is staying on current-gen for another game, I asked him what the most important thing he's learned about the PS3 has been now that he's working with the Cell architecture for two games and many years. "Because the development scale has gotten so large, it's become increasingly difficult to optimize," he began. "We learned that it wasn't enough for the programmers and engineers to work at optimization. It had to be the artists and the designers [too]. Everyone had to learn how to optimize systems in order for it to work."
Finally, given that my recent week-long test drive of the revolutionary Tesla Model S completely blew me away and the fact that the car is playable in Gran Turismo 6, I couldn't help but ask Yamauchi-san if he'd driven the all-electric sedan in real life. He indicated he had, and then, smiling, said, "It's on a very high level of perfection as a car."
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/23/gran-turismo-6-to-make-dream-cars-almost-real
I was the one driving.