The second Gran Turismo game for the PS2 showed many of the same improvements, but also many of the same flaws. GT4 was to GT3 as GT2 was to GT1: mostly the same idea, but more of everything. It also sometimes looked worse than the first game, but with the PD team coaxing every last bit of performance out of the PS1 to accommodate all the extra cars and tracks, that wasn't much of a surprise. Numerous short, one-make races allowed you to – and forced you to – experience a car for a short time before you had to jump back into the main career slog. GT2 was only let down by being almost too big for its boots, and too much of a grind to get through. And who can forget the Suzuki Escudo Pikes Peak, now practically synonymous with Gran Turismo? This was a way to feature cars that looked quite like Porsches without having to pay for the expensive Porsche licence. The game also introduced the world to Ruf, a manufacturer in Germany that builds incredible performance cars inside the shells of Porsche models. Or the Vector W8, a 600bhp, twin turbo V8 with a three-speed automatic gearbox that was basically a plane with wheels. Take Renault's crazy Espace F1, a minivan shell over a Williams Formula One car. Many of the cars it contained have never been seen again in Gran Turismo, or any other racing game. Where the first game had only featured ten manufacturers, GT2 boasted almost 40. Gran Turismo 2's charm was the unrivalled, and rather unhinged, car list. Your own favourite may simply come down to which you played most in your youth! Separating out the PS1 and PS2 titles is a challenge, as each has their own charm – and their own flaws. This no doubt contributed to GT6 being the poorest-selling title of all mainline GT games to date.
Stranger still was the decision to release the game on the PS3, as the PS4 came out the week before GT6 did. Again, the majority of the car list was those PS2 relics dating back to 2004. There were still one or two foibles though.
Polyphony kept the game updated with free downloadable content, including the unique Vision GT project which involved car manufacturers creating concept cars specifically for the game. The system’s main menu was slicker and more contemporary, and the game threw in some amazing extras like a special section celebrating Ayrton Senna’s life, a track creator, a data logger that allowed comparison with real life laps of the real tracks, and three driving missions on the Moon.
It did away with the roadblocks that GT5 left in the way of your progress, and improved netcode made the online racing more stable. In most respects it was a considerable improvement over GT5. GT6’s development was much quicker, and the game arrived three years after GT5. The game has been constantly evolving and reinventing itself over the years, perhaps most of all with the latest version, Gran Turismo Sport, and we've been looking over the old titles to decide which was our favourite. Gran Turismo has also been the tool to give a number of young gamers – like Jann Mardenborough – their own real racing careers. It's become integrated into car culture, appearing in the Fast and Furious film franchise and even getting involved in the design of real cars.
Two decades on, the Gran Turismo series is Sony's number one franchise, selling more than 75 million titles across five platforms.
It made a variety of realistic car modifications available and gave you a motorsport career, racing around dark city streets or purpose-built track venues, while teaching you how to drive fast through its licence system. Born from the Japanese car modification culture, the first game allowed players to take a range of ordinary cars – from the humble Honda Civic to the top tier of Japanese-market sports cars like the Toyota Supra – and race them against each other.