Gran Turismo Series Sells More than 55 Million Units

Polyphony Digital, the long time developer in charge of the series, has announced that the Gran Turismo series has sold more than 55 million units, according to sales data centralized in December 2009, which makes the series one of the most important in the history of gaming.

Interestingly, the European market has been crucial to the success of Gran Turismo, with more than 25 million units sold, while the series moved about 19.8 million copies in North America and close to 10 million on the Japanese market.

The first Gran Turismo videogame was outed in 1997 in Japan, on the very first PlayStation gaming console. Gamers were attracted to the graphics, which were pushing the capabilities of the Sony device at the time, and to the physics engine included in the game that allowed for some very realistic races. The best selling installment remains Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec, the first PlayStation 2 game in the series, that arrived in 2001 and managed to sell 14.89 million units.

The latest Gran Turismo title released by Polyphony Digital is a PlayStation Portable version that arrived in October 2009 alongside the new Go version of the handheld. It has so far sold about 1.8 million copies globally.

Of course, fans of the series are less interested in it breaking records and more in the release of Gran Turismo 5, the game that Polyphony Digital has said is pretty much done but that still does not have a launch date.

Sony has said that it would release it in Japan in March but has since pushed back the launch to an unspecified date. Recently, a European representative of Sony stated that the game was set to be out before Christmas but no clear dates were announced for either North America or Europe. Gran Turismo 5 has been in development for six years and cost more than 60 million dollars to make until now.