14 DAY TRIAL // Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of the Gran Turismo franchise, believes that in the future the Gran Turismo racing simulation has the potential to be as important to the real-world sport it portrays as FIFA is at the moment to football.
The game maker believes that the collaboration between Polyphony Digital, publisher Sony and the FIA, aka Federation Internationale de l'Automobile, needs to deepen in order to create a better virtual racing experience and attract more fans to it.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Kazunori Yamauchi states, “Football has a lot of fans. The population of motorsport fans is much, much smaller than that of football fans. And it's declining over the years. We have a sense of urgency regarding the fact that it's declining - both myself and Jean Todt.”
The FIFA series of video games is created by EA Sports and constantly delivers one of the best-sellers of the year, with gamers continuing to play and buy it for long periods of time after launch.
Competition is offered by Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 from Konami, which has witnessed a decline in its own fortunes over the last few years.
Gran Turismo has been created as an attempt to deliver a very realistic racing game experience that would run only on PlayStation home consoles from Sony.
Kazunori Yamauchi says that, apart from the collaboration with FIA, his company is also aiming to open up conversations about the future of racing, both in the virtual and the real worlds, with a variety of other potential partners.
He adds, “The FIA's a huge challenge, obviously. Below the FIA there are over 100 automobile clubs all over the world, and it's more than just car manufacturers. So we'll be communicating with all of them, to think about what's necessary for the next 100 years of motorsport.”
Recently, the game creator was part of a team which participated in the 24-hour race at Nurburgring, where he competed in a Nissan GT-R with GT Academy winner Jordan Tresson and Tobias and Michael Schulze.
Interestingly, the setup of the vehicle was created by the team at Polyphony Digital and many of the values were based on extensive simulation done in the Gran Turismo 6 engine.
At the moment, the studio is working on a new title, which will be launched on the PlayStation 4 home console from Sony, but no company is at the moment willing to talk about a potential launch window.