While Gran Turismo Sport selling 982,360 copies in its first week at retail was already impressive, the 20-year-old series has officially surpassed 80.4 million sales as of May 5.
Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of the Gran Turismo series, is “really happy” about the news.
“It’s hard to imagine that 80.4 million copies of Gran Turismo have been played during the 20-year history of the franchise,” he said “It makes me really happy to think of the immense amount of time that has been poured into playing our games! I would like to express my sincere thanks and appreciation for the community, as well as our close friends and supporters within the automotive industry.”
The Gran Turismo series made its debut on the PlayStation in 1998 and sold over 10 million units, and Gran Turismo 2 followed in 1999, selling over 9 million units.
Gran Turismo Sport is the latest entry in the series and was released on the PlayStation 4 in October 2017. According to Yamauchi, the game contains newly designed car models that can last another 10 years, so it looks like he still has plenty of plans for the future of the series.
“Three years ago, we basically reset all the car models in the game, to start building them from scratch,” he said. “Now, the models have been created at a quality that will last for ten years from this point on. We intend to add more and more models in future updates, so you don’t have to worry about that. We have a lot of plans to add content post-launch.​”
Yamauchi has also spoke of the suitability of the PlaySation 4 for the series compared to the PlaySation 3.
“The PS3 was a combination of a poor GPU with an SPU that’s really fast if you use it right. It’s not a very well-balanced machine. It’s hard to use the hardware properly. That’s one reason why it took us five years to develop GT5. Using the SPU properly, though, that in itself is really interesting. On the PS3, in the demo, we showed the adaptive tessellation. That’s the kind of technology that you normally wouldn’t be able to do unless you were on the PS4-generation of machines. When you optimize the use of the SPU properly, you can do that even on the PS3.
That leads into how we work on the PS4. The PS4 isn’t as off-balance as the PS3 was. If you look at the market right now, Gran Turismo is one of the only games on the PS3 that does 1080p at 60 frames per second. It was really difficult to achieve that. On the PS4, the lowest common denominator is going to be boosted. Most games will be able to do 1080p at 60 frames per second. That’s the real good part about the PS4.”