Gran Turismo 5 Out for Christmas 2009

The racing genre is one of the most prolific this holiday season. Earlier in the year, we saw Pure focusing on tricks and high air, we can now play around with Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, which focuses on pure madness and there's also Moto GP 08 if you like two wheeled machines. GRID was the title supposed to appeal to hardcore racing enthusiasts. And, of course, who can forget Burnout Paradise, which has been getting updates and new game modes since summer.

However, what we're not playing around with is Gran Turismo 5, the real racer meant to represent the be all, end all of the genre. Sony released Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, which is supposed to be a preview of what the game would play like, but the limited number of cars and tracks in the game means that fans have already exhausted all the possibilities of that title. The wait for Gran Turismo 5 is not going to be short, although some sources from Sony hinted at a March 2009 release.

James Armstrong, the spokesperson for Sony Europe, was spotted by Kotaku stating that the racing title would only be out in time for Christmas 2009, which means that there's still one year to go until play time. Recently, Kazunori Yamauchi, the boss of Polyphony Digital, said that the game was “moving forward” and that 150 people had been working on the game so far. Apparently, the development costs are over 50 times bigger than those of the original game in the series.

The title should really offer something special in order to justify this kind of investment of both time and money. The developers need to focus on delivering a game which fans can compare favorably with the very good Gran Turismo 4.