While Gran Turismo is one of the tentpole franchises for Sony since the PlayStation One era, former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida says the first game might have ended up being too realistic to have been fun.
Speaking to PlayStation Inside, Yoshida reminisced about what he considers to be one of his great career moments. One of these moments was a conversation he had with game designer Kazunori Yamauchi while the first Gran Turismo was still in development for the original PlayStation. In this conversation, as well as after playing an early prototype, Yoshida found the game to lean too hard on its gameplay realism.
“And to talk about a ‘success’ in my career that hasn’t been mentioned enough, if at all, I’ll give you an anecdote that I’ve never told in public before,” said Yoshida. “It was the early days of the first PlayStation, and Kazunori Yamauchi was working on the very first Gran Turismo. You’ll remember that on the cover it said that the game was the ‘real driving simulator’. And you know, I’m not a game designer, I’m a producer first and foremost.”
“During development, Kazunori Yamauchi showed me a prototype of Gran Turismo, and I was among the first to play it. And to tell you the truth, he was really serious when he talked about simulation!”
Yoshida remembered the prototype being “extremely advanced”. However, Yamauchi apparently hadn’t taken the feedback into account at the time, and ultimately got more feedback from consumers to play test the game. According to Yoshida, all of the playtesters ended up crashing their cars on the first turn in the game.
“It was extremely advanced, perhaps too much so,” he said. “But at first Kazunori Yamauchi didn’t take my feedback at face value, so he gathered around thirty consumers to test the game. And just as I expected, they all crashed without exception at the first turn, because the gameplay was so difficult.
“I was at the back of the room with Kazunori Yamauchi, at which point he turned to me and told me I was right, and that’s when he rounded things off and toned down the pure simulation aspect a little to put out the Gran Turismo you know today on PS1.”
“In a way, I like to think that I partly saved Gran Turismo’s fate, and that I played a small part in its success!”
Later in the interview, Yoshida also spoke about some of the most important colleagues he got to work alongside during his time with PlayStation. Bringing up two in particular, he shouted out Ken Kutaragi, who is widely considered to be the father of the PlayStation, along with Sony Interactive Entertainment co-founder and head of first-party game development, Akira Sato.
“If I may, I’d like to mention two people,” said Yoshida. “The first is of course Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation. Everything has been said about him. He was there when I arrived at Sony, and it was his vision that really led the company to become the video game behemoth it is today.”
“The second person is Akira Sato. I could also mention other people such as Andrew House and Kaz Hirai, with whom I have worked extensively.”
Yoshida had worked with PlayStation since all the way back in 1993 when the PlayStation team was still in its initial stages. After having worked with the company for more than 31 years, his departure was announced back in November 2024. Since then, he has been quite prolific in talking about his time at the company.
