Gran Turismo Creator Interview

The guys at 1UP got a chance to interview Kazunori Yamauchi at a launch event by Sony for the game, Tourist Trophy, held at an official PlayStation store in San Francisco. Kazunori Yamauchi was the head of development at Polyphony Digital, and currently is a Sony Computer Entertainment Executive.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

1UP: Since Sony has restructured its various divisions, your job has changed. How does your day to day job differ from what it used to be when you were just in charge of Polyphony?
Kazunori Yamauchi: The change may not be huge, but there is in fact a change to my day to day activities. Previously, I was 100% in charge of Polyphony and that was all I had to worry about, but currently maybe 30% of my day to day activities represent SCE corporate or overall PlayStation business planning or strategies — things like that.

1UP: Now that Tourist Trophy is done, looking back on it, what are you most proud of and what might you have done differently?
Kazunori Yamauchi: The most proud area is that we were able to be the first game that features real physics and performance simulation of bikes in a videogame. An area that we had hoped to fix but couldn’t would be displaying more bikes on the screen for a race — that would obviously lead to a more exciting race, but this has been a limitation we’ve faced with the hardware performance unfortunately.

1UP: I know some of the same art assets were used in Tourist Trophy from Gran Turismo. From here do you see it becoming its own franchise, or is this more an experiment to see how it goes and then you’ll decide at that point?
Kazunori Yamauchi: Back at the studio, Polyphony, we do have test machines where we can display both cars and bikes on the same tracks, just for experiment purposes. Perhaps maybe in the future we might have a title where we have both. This time around, the reason why they’ve been separated is only a technical reason, with these performance limitations with the PlayStation 2.

1UP: Finally, can you give us any update on Gran Turismo PSP?
Kazunori Yamauchi: We are in the works. It is going forward. It does exist. We’re working on it. We don’t have a release date, of course. A question for you is do people out there really have high hopes for a GT version on PSP?

It’s disappointing that he didn’t reveal a release date for the PSP version of Gran Turismo. Judging from the lack of must-have titles for the PSP, I feel that they’re shining and polishing it to a level that just about nobody will be able to give it a miss. Click below to read the whole interview at 1UP.com
The guys at 1UP got a chance to interview Kazunori Yamauchi at a launch event by Sony for the game, Tourist Trophy, held at an official PlayStation store in San Francisco. Kazunori Yamauchi was the head of development at Polyphony Digital, and currently is a Sony Computer Entertainment Executive.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

1UP: Since Sony has restructured its various divisions, your job has changed. How does your day to day job differ from what it used to be when you were just in charge of Polyphony?
Kazunori Yamauchi: The change may not be huge, but there is in fact a change to my day to day activities. Previously, I was 100% in charge of Polyphony and that was all I had to worry about, but currently maybe 30% of my day to day activities represent SCE corporate or overall PlayStation business planning or strategies — things like that.

1UP: Now that Tourist Trophy is done, looking back on it, what are you most proud of and what might you have done differently?
Kazunori Yamauchi: The most proud area is that we were able to be the first game that features real physics and performance simulation of bikes in a videogame. An area that we had hoped to fix but couldn’t would be displaying more bikes on the screen for a race — that would obviously lead to a more exciting race, but this has been a limitation we’ve faced with the hardware performance unfortunately.

1UP: I know some of the same art assets were used in Tourist Trophy from Gran Turismo. From here do you see it becoming its own franchise, or is this more an experiment to see how it goes and then you’ll decide at that point?
Kazunori Yamauchi: Back at the studio, Polyphony, we do have test machines where we can display both cars and bikes on the same tracks, just for experiment purposes. Perhaps maybe in the future we might have a title where we have both. This time around, the reason why they’ve been separated is only a technical reason, with these performance limitations with the PlayStation 2.

1UP: Finally, can you give us any update on Gran Turismo PSP?
Kazunori Yamauchi: We are in the works. It is going forward. It does exist. We’re working on it. We don’t have a release date, of course. A question for you is do people out there really have high hopes for a GT version on PSP?

It’s disappointing that he didn’t reveal a release date for the PSP version of Gran Turismo. Judging from the lack of must-have titles for the PSP, I feel that they’re shining and polishing it to a level that just about nobody will be able to give it a miss. Click below to read the whole interview at 1UP.com