Maximum power output – Gran Turismo 2

**Gran Turismo 2** (Polyphony/Sony, PlayStation, 2000)

Gran Turismo was a vast achievement. It provided a finessed racing experience backed up with an obsessive level of detail on cars, all looped into a rewarding progression. It dwarfed its immediate predecessors in scale. That presented a potential problem for a sequel, though. Where some games like Cool Boarders which establish a new way of playing leave obvious room for a sequel, Gran Turismo was far too complete for that. Just two years after its release, though, Polyphony managed to make Gran Turismo 2 into its own kind of awe-inspiring jump.

Gran Turismo 2 makes that jump with, for most of its time, entirely the same racing model. It’s still largely made of short races with six cars, with its realistic handling balanced by stripping down the racing and leaving you with the option of cannoning your way around the track bouncing off all the other cars. Instead of risking a change there, Polyphony expanded everything around it. Gran Turismo 2 is enormous. It has more of everything than Gran Turismo. Its career mode is so big that the arcade mode had to be shuffled off to a second CD (the arcade mode is the only one to get the cinematic intro, soundtracked by a remix of The Cardigans’ “My Favourite Game” from their 1998 album Gran Turismo, one of those times when putting together the obvious has a supremely satisfying result). Across both modes, Gran Turismo 2 has more tracks, including a wider variety of imagined ones and now some directly based on real places, like Laguna Seca with its thrilling downhill corkscrew, and street circuits in Rome and Seattle.

There are many new things stuffed into the career mode. It has more licence tests. It has some additional racing modes, including a bit of rudimentary Colin McRae-style offroad, and some ludicrously extended endurance races. Most of all, it has more cars, even more obsessively detailed. This is still a game which doesn’t ever give the names of any drivers but lists its race results by the make of each competitor’s car, after all. There were a handful of US and European models in Gran Turismo alongside all the Japanese ones, but Gran Turismo 2 fleshes that out to give sections for France, Italy, Germany, the UK and USA almost everything the Japanese selection has short of used car markets. Manufacturers each have special models for the big-spending endgame, including some delightful oddities like the Renault Espace F1, a sort of rocket-powered minibus. Everything comes with lengthy descriptions should you want to learn some history and technical info.

And Gran Turismo 2’s career mode gives you more things to do. There are more championships, mostly chopped up to be played a race at a time, qualifying discarded, the better for you to pick and choose what you want to do and try out lots quickly. You upgrade and win and buy your way into more cars and more races. Race entry requirements are sorted by horsepower, drive type, and nationality, so working out how to best play the requirements is an intriguing game of its own. There are even model-specific races for each manufacturer, a nice extra motivation for buying some of the more unusual choices that might not perform well against other cars.

With the racing keeping all of its strengths from the original game, and the new contexts of different types of cars and tracks and tasks giving it new life, Gran Turismo 2 has a lot of depth to get lost in. Playing all of that could conceivably replace all other games for a long chunk of time. In the summer of 2000, it certainly did for me. Cutting across corners and racing towards the stunning sunset of Red Rock Valley Speedway put me right back there, amazed again and again by how many enjoyable things I was doing while still barely scraping the surface.

The idea of games offering an all-encompassing experience was not completely new. We’d had games which sought to simulate the history of civilisation, or give you the entire galaxy on a floppy disk. But bringing that kind of scope to the world of driving games and matching it with bitesize accessibility feels like an important new step. Thanks to the limitations of the PlayStation, Gran Turismo 2 didn’t have the means to drip-feed all of those possibilities over time, or to charge players for individual segments of them, or to provide a steady stream of remote human opponents. Yet in its dual scales, its abundance of little challenges, it points towards a future where games would be able to do all of that. For better or worse, Gran Turismo 2 is one step closer to infinite content.