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How Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi views the intersection of racing and games | The DeanBeat
06.10.2023 - 17:17 / venturebeat.com
Kazunori Yamauchi is one of the legends of game development and his Gran Turismo games are a flagship title on every PlayStation game console with lifetime sales above 90 million. And while racing is his passion, he stands at one of the most interesting intersections in gaming.
Racing is a sport and the crossover between sports and video games is getting deeper. The reverb is ringing in my head. I got to experience that reverberation last week while watching Gran Turismo players race each other in an esports tournament using highly realistic racing simulators built around PlayStation 5 consoles. Just outside the esports building at the Rennsport Reunion 7 exhibition, Porsche race cars were roaring around the Laguna Seca track with an incredible volume that added some cool sound effects while I was watching the indoor race.
Inside, Gran Turismo player Randall Haywood shrugged off the sounds and concentrated on winning the tournament, which netted him $15,000 in winnings. It was a surreal moment that reminded me of this summer’s Gran Turismo movie, which tells the true story of how Jann Marborough became a pro racer by learning how to race in the video game.
Back when Marborough was starting out, he encountered resistance from pro racers who felt that a video game racer was going to be too amateurish, endangering other racers on real tracks. In a marketing move, Nissan set up the GT Academy to train video game drivers how to be racers. It lasted for a while until 2016, when creator Darren Cox parted ways with Nissan. It enabled Marborough to go pro.
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Haywood liked how Porsche embraced esports enough to put it inside the racing festival. Like Marborough’s parents, Haywood’s family resisted his passion for playing games and racing. But just like in the movie, once he started winning his family came around. To me, that’s a microcosm of how gaming — once the domain of nerds — is becoming accepted in mass culture, one family at a time. (This is the theme of a GamesBeat event that we plan to do on December 7 ahead of The Game Awards in Los Angeles).
Speaking through a translator, Yamauchi told me in an interview that he loved how the movie captured the story, but it was a very abridged view of the real life story that he witnessed himself. It’s hard to capture life in a movie, just as it’s hard to capture a real-life sport in a video game. During this interview, I was asking questions alongside a car journalist and another car journalist who used to be a game journalist.
Yamauchi was at the Porsche event
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