Interviews

Let’s hope it inspires him to bring a similarly robust track editor to the Gran Turismo series! Thanks to Randy for the early tip.

The first batch of Kazunori Yamauchi interviews are finally getting published from last week’s Tokyo Game Show 2010! Here’s a translated transcript of GameBlog’s video interview above, kindly provided by our own RoadRunner99:

InsideSimRacing has just published their Gran Turismo 5 Special, dedicating almost the entire 38-minute episode to video reports from Gamescom 2010 by our cooperative team of Andreas (from InsideSimRacing), Famine, and Venari. They discuss everything that we learned from the show, and go into more detail about the private breakout session, the Yamauchi interview, and how the latest GT5 demo compares to previous games from the series. It’s divided into three different segments, so be sure to watch through the full episode to make sure you catch everything. The guys at ISR have even more GT5 material from the show coming, so stay tuned.

Hello all, from drizzly Cologne!

Thanks to gamer28 for digging up this short-but-sweet interview by AOL Autos with Kazunori Yamauchi, as he discusses the role that hybrid cars will play in Gran Turismo 5. Most notably, he also mentions you’ll be able to “tune” hybrids – with the recommendation of turbo-charging the new Honda CR-Z which will be featured in the game.

After all we’ve learned over the past week, is the best still yet to come? That’s what Sony’s associate Gran Turismo 5 producer Chris Hinojosa-Miranda hinted at during this video interview with “Gamestradamus“. When asked about his “favorite feature” in the last question of the interview, Chris responds “Eh..that is undisclosed.” Chris also mentions that they’ve listened closely to the “forums and blogs” (read: us) when choosing how to implement the game’s online features and functionality.

GT series creator Kazunori Yamauchi is taking your questions live, right now, via Honda’s official Twitter account! If you’re on Twitter, submit your questions by including the “#Honda” and “#E3” hash-tags in your tweets. I’ll be following the interview closely and will update this post accordingly. The interview starts right now, at 12:00 PM Pacific Time!

GTPlanet’s own Maziar Shahsafdari (Synwraith) joined RJN Motorsports last weekend for their first race of the season, and he’s come away with a new appreciation for GT Academy winners Jordan Tresson and Lucas Ordoñez. His close contact with everyone in the team has provided an inside look at who these guys really are, and explains how their mental toughness sets them apart from the rest of us. It’s a great read, and I guarantee you’ll come away from the article with a new perspective on the GT Academy program and the driving talent it has discovered so far. Click here to check it out, and be sure to leave a word of thanks to Maziar for all of his hard work in putting this together (thanks again, Maz!)! I’d also like GTP reader Casey for sharing the following pictures from last weekend’s race:

In what is presumably the last of Kazunori Yamauchi’s round of interviews to emerge from his time at Snetterton, he’s made a comment regarding the development status of the big game:

You can put any doubts you had about Gran Turismo 5’s 3D support to rest. Taku Imasaki, a U.S. based producer for the game, confirmed that it will feature this new technology.

During his time at Snetterton to watch the two GT Academy 2010 finalists compete for the top spot, Kazunori Yamauchi talked with quite a few journalists. His last interview to be published is with BBC’s TopGear. As you would expect, there aren’t any bombshells, but here’s the most notable quotes:

One of the more unpleasant surprises we’ve had waiting for Gran Turismo 5 was the unexpected postponement of the game’s March 2010 Japanese release. It was a quiet announcement, but set a somber tone at the beginning of the year for us eager fans. Since that time, we have not received any sort of information on exactly why that happened – until now. In an excellent interviewwith Dean Gibson of AutoExpress last weekend, Yamauchi-san clarified things a little bit:

Kazunori Yamauchi was (and actually still is, thanks to Iceland’s volcano) in the UK this past weekend to meet with the GT Academy 2010 winners at Snetterton. That went well, but the first interview to emerge from his visit (which appears to have been removed from AutoBlog UK) has already caused a great deal of teeth-grinding in our forums. Here’s the problem:

An ESPN interview with Gran Turismo series creator Kazunori Yamauchi from SEMA last month slipped under the radar (thanks for the heads-up, Patrik), probably due to the lack of any news or interesting information.  The interviewer is actually a writer for ESPN’s motorsports division and is not part of the games industry, so we can cut him slack for not asking deeper questions about the future of the series.  Still, he managed to get some good quotes from Yamauchi-san:

Gaming site IGN was at SEMA this year for the unveiling of the 2008 Gran Turismo Awards, and they caught up with GT series creator Kazunori Yamauchi for a few questions.  Like most ‘mainstream press’ interviews (and nothing like Ahmed’s), the questions are not very pressing, and very little is revealed.  Still, it’s worth checking out.  Video after the jump…

Finally, we get to see what happens when a real player of the Gran Turismo series sits down with its creator, Kazunori Yamauchi.  As winner of the GT5 Prologue Middle East Challenge, Ahmed Al Azmi was invited to Polyphony Digital’s studios in Japan to check out where the game is made.  He also got one-on-one time with Yamauchi, and asked him real questions that your average gaming journalist wouldn’t even understand.  Of course, he doesn’t drop any bombshells, but it’s still a fascinating and revealing discussion.  Read Ahmed’s full interview for all the pictures and impressions.  We’ve gathered some of the most important facts and other tidbits below:

Takau Imasaki’s recent interview at the 2008 Game Developers Conference reveals little new information, but gives us a brief glimpse inside the development of the series and where it may be headed. Imasaki is the SCEA producer responsible for making the GT games more “friendly” to the U.S. market. He takes credit for “speeding up” the original Gran Turismo to give it a more arcade feel – one that he felt would be more popular with stateside gamers. The most interesting part of the interview came when Imasaki was asked about why they planned to release ‘Prologue’ in the first place: “We want to get the experience of developing an online game. By having something out there, you learn from a lot of consumer feedback and learning how consumers play the game online… Microsoft and other companies are light years ahead of us in terms of experience, so we want to get that experience as well.” Check out the full interview below:

Part 2 of the Kazunori Yamauchi interview that we posted yesterday has been uploaded by GTChannel. There isn’t many interesting questions for this second part of the interview, but he did mention an interesting aspect of the online Gran Turismo 5 experience that we haven’t heard before: “users can also create an online community – for example, fans or owners of the GT-R can create a community or team of their own…” It will certainly be interesting to see if this new feature is mentioned down the road as it has a lot of potential to expand on the game’s online arena.

A new interview with Kazunori Yamauchi was just released by GTChannel, where he discusses some interesting things about his own history and projects that he has worked on in the past. His own personal garage consists of a heavily modified Nissan 350Z, a Honda S2000, a Porsche GT3, and a Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG which he uses as his daily driver. He also owns two Ford GT’s: one white, and one in gunmetal gray.