Interview with GT5 Head Reveals Budget and More

sema-yamauchi

When Kazunori Yamauchi, the father of Gran Turismo, shows up and speaks, people tend to listen, and that is exactly what they did at the SEMA Auto Show as he sat down to talk cars and Gran Turismo 5.

At the recent SEMA Auto Show, Yamauchi, the head of Polyphony Digital, spoke with Autoweek.com about the upcoming GT5. He touched on various topics, from the budget to the release date. Some of the main excepts from the interview are below. The full interview can be viewed at autoweek.com.

What did GT5 cost to make?

$60 million. There are other games that cost more. Considering the size and scale of the game, I think it’s probably a fairly small amount.

When will you release GT5?

We will release it in March in Japan but for other regions, it has not been decided yet.

What’s holding it up?

That’s more depending on SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America) marketing decisions.

You have NASCAR and WRC in the game. Does this include the complete list of all tracks in those series?

The NASCAR series is so large it would be impossible to put everything in the game. We will have select courses and select cars in the game. You will also be able to race the stock cars on a number of tracks not found on the NASCAR calendar. In speaking with NASCAR, they said they’d like to see their cars able to race on other tracks, and you can do that [in GT5].

Will you have F1, ALMS or FIA GT?

We had a Ferrari F1 car in the game. For FIA GT and ALMS, we won’t have that in the series yet. But we will have a lot of cars that race at Le Mans, so in that sense, there will be cars from ALMS.

How do you chose which cars get in the game?

There will be three types: cars we want, the cars the users would like to see in the game and then cars the manufacturers want in it.

Have you played Forza Motorsport 3?

I was watching the guys at our company trying it out in the office. I tried it a little bit. It’s very similar in a lot of aspects to Gran Turismo. Some base components of the game are very different from Gran Turismo. It’s a little bit different from what a simulator is. You can feel it when you drive it.

Will there be a Gran Turismo 6?

Yes. You won’t have to wait as long as you did for GT5. GT5 represents a whole new operating system.GT6 is just new apps that run on the GT5 system.