Gran Turismo/Trivia


 * Cash Cow Franchise: Sort of. They don't pump the games out for money, but the games tend to be massive sellers.
 * Development Hell: Pretty much every iteration of the series goes through it. The most commonly-cited reason is the licensing issues related to the in-game cars.
 * The most glaring example would be the PSP port of the fourth game, which was originally scheduled to be released in April 2005 to coincide with the debut of the PSP. Unfortunately, it was neglected in favor of Gran Turismo, and as a result, took four years to be released.
 * Doing It for the Art: The level of detail they put into it is pretty much mind blowing.
 * Despite a native resolution of 480p, two games on the PlayStation 2 supported 1080i resolution on the PlayStation 2 - GT4, and Tourist Trophy made by (you guessed it) Polyphony Digital.
 * Allowing race modifications for almost all cars in the second game. Doesn't sound very artistic, until you consider every racing modification is an Expy of a real world racing car. Even cars such as the early 80's Toyota Starlet - a 174HP economy car which was never professionally raced - is based off an actual racer built by an amateur team for track days.
 * In the first two games, all FWD saloons from the late 90's could be turned into their touring car counterpart from the period.
 * Dueling Games: With Forza Motorsport. Forza contained elements such as car vinyl creation, full damage modelling and performance changes as a result. The GT series would not see the latter until a few games later in the series.
 * Executive Meddling: Gran Turismo 2 was rushed to store shelves for the Christmas period. Cue Game Breaking Bug(s), a few dozen typos, deleted cars, and (biggest of all) the omission of a drag racing mode.
 * Promotional material, the website and even the instruction booklet all make mention of the illusive drag racing mode. Two or three drag cars slipped their way into the game, although were pretty useless. This just shows how much Sony were pressuring Polyphony into getting the game in a marketable state.
 * Hell, the deletion of the drag racing made 100% completion Unwinnable By Mistake, as the player could only achieve 98.2%. Sony admitted they were trying to get the game out in time for the holiday rush, and offered a bug-free version with 100% completion available. The drag racing was still omitted however.
 * External executive meddling (between Panoz and Nissan) led to Nissan-marked DeltaWing removed from GT6... only to be added back at the last minute, thanks to day one patch. Now players has two DeltaWings to drive (the 2012 one at Le Mans and the 2013 one with it's chrome livery), with DeltaWing assigned as manufacturer name.
 * The Red Stapler: Subaru and Mitsubishi have said that the popularity of their vehicles in-game was what convinced them to start importing the Impreza WRX and the Lancer Evolution to the United States.
 * The fact that the Nissan Skyline GT-R was 1) affordable at the start of the game and 2) tunable up to 800-1000 BHP must account for some of its prevalence in the modified car scene in the 90s and early 00s, as the 'Playstation Generation' grew up.
 * Schedule Slip: After three years in development a "March 2010" release date for GT5 was finally announced at E3 2009. Then it went back into the "delayed indefinitely" pile. Then a new release date of November 2nd, 2010 was announced at E3 2010. Then the game was delayed again (reportedly for missing its production date due to firmware issues) until the final release date of November 24th, 2010 was announced. Which, thankfully, they managed to stick to. During this time period, the game has had 2 free demos, one non-free demo and that demo's "Greatest Hits" re-release come out between it's announcement and the final launch date.