- Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida says he helped save the first Gran Turismo
- Yoshida said that the game’s simulation aspects were “extremely advanced” and suggested to creator Kazunori Yamauch to tone them down
- He adds that he likes to think he “played a small part in its success”
Former Sony Interactive Entertainment president Shuhei Yoshida has revealed that he convinced the creator of the first Gran Turismo game, Kazunori Yamauchi, to tone down the game’s simulation elements.
Speaking in a recent interview with PlayStation Inside, Yoshida was asked to touch on some of his greatest moments from his career at PlayStation. After briefly discussing Thatgamecompany’s award-winning game Journey, which he was “really proud to have played a part in its conception”, the ex-PlayStation boss revealed that he “partly saved” the original Gran Turismo.
“To talk about a ‘success’ in my career that hasn’t been mentioned enough, if at all, I’ll give you an anecdote that I’ve never told in public before,” Yoshida said.
“It was the early days of the first PlayStation, and Kazunori Yamauchi was working on the very first Gran Turismo. You’ll remember that on the cover it said that the game was the ‘real driving simulator’. And you know, I’m not a game designer, I’m a producer first and foremost.
“During development, Kazunori Yamauchi showed me a prototype of Gran Turismo, and I was among the first to play it. And to tell you the truth, he was really serious when he talked about simulation!”
Yoshida explained that what he played was “extremely advanced, perhaps too much so” due to the realism, but it wasn’t until after playtests did Yamauchi use his feedback to tweak the 1997 game.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
In the same interview, Yoshida touched on the Nintendo Switch 2 and said that the recent rise in the cost of games “was going to happen sooner or later” due to inflation and production costs, but thinks “a balance must be found between production costs and game prices”.
