Gran Turismo

When Sony promised „The Real Driving Simulator,“ it sounded like a bold marketing slogan. But Gran Turismo fulfilled it completely and forever changed the notion of what a racing game on a console could look like.

Behind the vision stood Kazunori Yamauchi and his studio Polyphony Digital, who wanted more than just fast cornering. Gran Turismo offered a huge garage of real licensed cars, a physics model that took a car's behavior on the track seriously, and above all a deep career mode. You had to earn driving licenses, make money by racing, buy cars, and gradually tune them — from the tires to the engine. The player became not just a driver, but also a collector and a mechanic.

This combination of simulation realism and near-RPG progression proved immensely addictive. The second installment then inflated the content to absurd proportions — over six hundred cars and dozens of tracks — and raised the bar even higher.

The success was staggering. The first Gran Turismo became the best-selling game on the original PlayStation ever, with sales exceeding ten million copies. That placed it not only among commercial phenomena, but among the titles that helped define the very identity of the PlayStation brand.

Gran Turismo became the benchmark of the entire genre — the yardstick against which realism, content, and the feel of driving were measured. The series continues to this day and retains its reputation as one of the most serious racing brands in the world.

Why play it: For the foundational experience of the modern racing sim, an inexhaustible collection of cars, and a career mode that will pull you in for hours on end.