The game that started it all! Were it not for Kazunori Yamauchi making this game, the world would be a much sadder place. Much sadder indeed. Who knows what the standard and quality of other car games would be like now if this Japanese development company had not created Gran Turismo.

Perhaps all the other car games would have square wheels, engine sounds like lawnmowers and weedeaters, graphics like a four year old childs' drawing of a rabbit in the forest, handling like a skateboard with no wheels, enough races to just last all of the five minute commercial break during your favourite TV programme, so many options/settings that you could count them with a closed fist and as many tracks as you could dream of - if your dreams included a maximum of three tracks. One circle one, one square one and a square and circle one combined. That's innovation!

Okay maybe i'm exaggerating (just a little...) but this game did make every other developer sit up and take notice. They obviously didn't sit up straight enough though as the Gran Turismo series has dominated this genre since day one and the 35 million + games sold just backs that up. Bow down.

RACES

The sad thing is that i never bought Gran Turismo. Although i did play it a bit (renting it out and borrowing from people) i never actually owned it. Which is why i can't really explain much about it. So. This game has races. You can race in them. If you won - you got a car or money. If you lost - then you would have to try again until you won.

Qualifying for the race was a really great feature of the game and essential if your car was disadvantaged in some way. As far as my memory serves you actually got one point for qualifying in first place. GT1 has the best qualifying feature in the series so far and is better than GT3's and definately GT4's (basically non-existant) qualifying too.

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CARS

One of the reasons why this game was so successfull was because of the amount of cars. Over 150 cars featured in the game which was more than any other game on the shelves at the time (until GT2 came along - showing off its 594 or so cars). Naturally the majority of them were Japanese and ranged from the Honda NSX, Nissan Skyline GT-R, Mazda RX-7 to the Japanese Grand Touring Cars. Then there were a few others from around the world such as TVR, Aston Martin, Chevrolet and Dodge.

There are ten of them below but if you want to check out the whole lot then click here.
~ Aston Martin DB7 Volante
~ Chevrolet Corvette Coupe '96
~ Honda Civic 3Door Si '93
~ Mazda FC Savanna RX-7 GT-X
~ Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III GSR
~ Nissan Skyline GTS-4 (R32)
~ Nissan Skyline GTS-25t Type M (R33)
~ Toyota Soarer 2.5 GT-T VVT-i
~ Toyota Supra RZ '95
~ TVR Griffith 4.0

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TRACKS

There's no real point in having a racing game without tracks now is there? (correct answer: no).
There was plenty of variety, from night-time tracks like Special Stage Route 5 and Clubman Stage Route 5 (smaller version of SSR5) to long twisty tracks like Grand Valley Speedway and the legendary High-speed Ring.

For more information on the tracks please click here.

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