Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec

The definitive document of early-'00s car culture

- PHIL IWANIUK

Developer/publisher - SCE (Polyphony Digital) 

Format - PS2 

Release - 2001

The launch of Sony’s PlayStation 2 was on the horizon, and Kazunori Yamauchi’s Polyphony Digital had a clear brief for its next Gran Turismo title: show the punters exactly what the hardware can do. This was the studio that discerned itself in the previous console generation by conjuring deeply realistic vehicles out of PlayStation’s wobbly polygons, creating a different kind of racing-game experience best summed up by the original game’s adverts – billboards along a motorway that read ‘Caution: you are not playing Gran Turismo’.

But Polyphony had always concerned itself with much more than realism. The new title it was developing at its studio in Tokyo’s Koto City ward was certainly making use of Sony’s new hardware architecture, rendering vehicle models with 28 times the polygonal complexity of Gran Turismo 2, and trackside environments with 128x128 textures that appeared pin-sharp on the CRT screens of the day. It looked every bit the generational leap that it was supposed to be, but that was never the focus. Polyphony – then and now – obsesses over the minutiae of car ownership.

Quite how far the studio had pushed this aspect wasn’t apparent in its first PS2 showing, a demo called Gran Turismo 2000 which gave players 120 seconds with a Mitsubishi Lancer around the Seattle circuit. The photorealism-chasing looks were there, along with the weighty, deliberate handling players had come to expect from a