Shuhei Yoshida says he ‘partly saved’ Gran Turismo from failure by convincing its creator to tame the handling
Kazunori Yamauchi wanted the game to feel a lot more realistic until Yoshida stepped in
Former SIE president Shuhei Yoshida says he played a part in preventing the first Gran Turismo from being a failure by convincing its creator Kazunori Yamauchi to make the handling less realistic.
In an interview with PlayStation Inside, Yoshida was asked if he could recall any great achievements from his career that he was proud of, but that had never been spoken about enough.
After briefly noting that he was “really proud to have played a part” in the conception of Journey, Yoshida then told his Gran Turismo development story, which he referred to as “an anecdote that I’ve never told in public before”.
Yoshida explained that in the early days of Gran Turismo’s development, Yamauchi wanted the cars’ handling to be extremely realistic, essentially meaning that high-powered supercars would be as difficult to control as in real life, before Yoshida convinced him otherwise.
“It was the early days of the first PlayStation, and Kazunori Yamauchi was working on the very first Gran Turismo,” he recalled. “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! It was extremely advanced, perhaps too much so.
“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.”
Yoshida quit Sony in January after 31 years at the company, where he helped launch the original PlayStation and served as its president of SIE Worldwide Studios between 2008 and 2019.
