It was somewhere around my fifteenth attempt to complete the A licence test ‘Coping with multiple corners 1’ that I realised that I was hooked as deeply into Gran Turismo again as I had been back when I played it in 1999. Each time I found a way of braking a little less and getting my car round the corner a little faster but my time still came in over the required 39 seconds, my resolve to master this particular tiny feat of driving just grew stronger.
Gran Turismo’s licence tests are an odd but brilliant thing. In order to get past certain points in its main Gran Turismo career mode, you have to pass a set of challenges. The first ones start with ‘drive in a straight line and then stop inside this box marked on the road’ and it builds up to time trials over a whole track. It tells you what each challenge is, maybe including some pointers to the likely behaviour of your car, but largely leaves you to work out how to do it by trial and error. Often a whole lot of it, because the requirements are strict. What keeps them brilliant rather than game-destroyingly annoying is their brevity. You fail quick, learn quick, and go again. It’s like Celeste or Super Meat Boy as a racing car tutorial.
The licence tests are a good way of introducing one key aspect of what Gran Turismo brings to the world of motor racing games. You get different cars to take on different tests in, and through repetition get an intimate feel for their handling, and it shows just how detailed and rewarding the driving experience is. Different cars understeer or oversteer to different extents in different situations, but never in the simplistic way of some other games like V-Rally. Different combinations of braking, easing off acceleration and steering produce a wide range of responses in a tricky but predictable way, and the tutorials work to learn a set of techniques and ways of responding to new situations with them. That carries through to its racing (on top of techniques the tutorial doesn’t teach you, like using other cars as the way to brake at sharp corners). Gran Turismo doesn’t just make you feel like you’re driving a fast car, but makes you feel like a racing driver.
The other transformative aspect of Gran Turismo alongside that satisfying handling is an insane scale and scope. A year earlier, Porsche Challenge had topped the chart based on a simulation of one model of car. Gran Turismo does more than a hundred of them, with at least as much detail on every one. It goes from cars you might see out on the road every day (at least if you live somewhere where Japanese cars of the ‘90s are popular, and where cars are not in lockdown) to high end sports cars, and evident love for every one of them comes through. You can read all about the Honda Prelude and its history and specifications (if not its pervert lever). You can also tune up your Honda Prelude in a ridiculous number of ways, and that’s where Gran Turismo’s most compelling elements of all come in.
You could play it as just a game of racing fast cars, and it has an arcade mode for that, and does it very well. It has a fantastic range of fictional tracks which feel like plausible places while also being designed with its racing entirely in mind. Races also make good use of brevity, and use rubber-banding to keep you on roughly the same pace as other cars without getting too blatant about it. The soundtrack of splashy contemporary British rock, Ash and Feeder and Garbage mixed deep into the background but resisting that status, even gives a grungey edge that the game’s slightly fussy detail would never allow otherwise. But Gran Turismo also has a career mode that is the Sensible World of Soccer to its arcade mode’s Sensible Soccer.
Gran Turismo gives you 10,000 credits to buy a used Japanese car with. And then you take your Honda Prelude or Mazda Eunos or Mitsubishi Mirage Cyborg and enter it into races, and win more credits depending on your performance. And you buy a slightly better car. Or you spend on incremental improvements to your car to make it that bit faster or better at braking. And you go back and race it some more, and do a bit better. Eventually you win a championship and get bigger prize money and a prize car. And you enter that into some different events. Or you go and sell it and spend the money on further improving the car you already have. In my case it was my second car that I took through the upgrades. With a nod back to V-Rally, and with a view to sliding around corners rally-style, it was a Subaru Impreza. From the options of different colours I obviously chose Sonic Blue (as in…?) and I got rather attached to my Impreza. It’s easy to feel a combined pride in both your performance and your car.
And once you save enough money (85,000 credits for the Impreza) you can pay for racing modification for it, and Gran Turismo mode hits its finest moment. With each improvement of transmission and brakes and everything else, you do notice a difference in the car’s performance. But once you splash on the racing modification, you get a massive all-round improvement in one go, and a new paint job and a big spoiler stuck on the back of the car. A different look isn’t that big of a deal, but when you’ve had to save up it takes on a significance that makes it feel like a transformative reward.
In truth, the struggle to get to the racing version is a little harsher than it needs to be, just because the jump up in performance from the first championship to any other event is rather steep. Even once I switched to the Impreza, there was a good while that trouncing the Sunday Cup several times over was the best way to earn money. Setting new lap records meant it felt less of a waste of time, but it still wasn’t ideal. Gran Turismo didn’t get everything right first go. But with something this ambitious and accomplished it would be difficult to.
