14 DAY TRIAL // Gran Turismo 6 features a special race on the moon with a lunar rover, and this special aspect of the game was born out of curiosity from the development team, according to creator Kazunori Yamauchi.
Gran Turismo 6 came out last year for the PS3 worldwide and delivered a great racing simulator experience, featuring over a thousand cars, 37 tracks, and a lot of bonus content.
As a special surprise for fans, however, developer Polyphony Digital introduced a special vehicle and circuit in Gran Turismo 6, in the form of the lunar rover and the moon.
Creator Kazunori Yamauchi has talked about this aspect of the game with the PS blog and said that the idea had just appeared inside the development team.
“We had been working for a while on simulating the stars properly in the game, and the moon was being recreated very accurately. While we were working on that, the idea just came out of the blue. We thought, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if you could drive on the surface of the moon?’ So we did some research into the lunar rover and thought we should make it available in the game to drive.”
This curiosity quickly fueled the recreation of the lunar rover as well as the possible racing conditions that can be found on the moon, which actually required a lot of work.
“It was something we knew we could do with the technology that we had. It was really born out of curiosity. And if you remember in the opening movie, the opening music is Rachmaninoff and the theme of that piece is ‘the moon.’ Things just connected one after another.”
“Researching the geography of the moon’s surface and going back and looking at the actual routes that Apollo 15 took was actually a lot of work!” Yamauchi added. “It was a difficult process but we did as accurately as we could possibly manage.”
The Gran Turismo franchise is already expected to debut for the PS4 in the form of Gran Turismo 7.