Polyphony Digital has released a special announcement marking the 25th anniversary of the Gran Turismo series, revealing that more than 90 million copies of Gran Turismo games have made their way into players’ hands thus far.
The official 25th anniversary of Gran Turismo is Friday, December 23, marking 25 years since Gran Turismo hit the shelves in its native Japan. While still December 22 for us at time of writing, the clocks have ticked past midnight into Friday in Japan, kicking off the birthday celebrations.
PlayStation doesn’t often produce specific sales figures these days, so the announcement that the GT franchise has shipped 90 million games is significant. The last update came from Polyphony Digital itself, announcing that 80.4 million copies of the game had been sold-through (to customers, rather than sold-in to retailers) as of May 2018.
That means roughly 10 million copies of Gran Turismo Sport and Gran Turismo 7 have reached players’ homes over the last four and a half years worldwide. Given the most recent GT Sport figures we have, we’d estimate around 5-6 million sales of GT7 in its first three quarters, already putting it roughly equal to GT6’s reported lifetime sales.
In addition to the announcement and video you can see above, series creator Kazunori Yamauchi has spoken about the origins of the game, remarking that it’s actually a stroke of luck that saw him making games in the first place and even more so racing games.
The comments, posted on the PlayStation Blog, again cover the young Yamauchi’s ambitions to be a film-maker — which look to be coming true soon — but ending up at a new division of Sony rather than the movie business.
“It was a department where the PlayStation console was just about to start,” says Yamauchi, “and was a place where Kutaragi-san was working feverishly to bring the concept of PlayStation to life. That place was not what I had hoped for, but looking back now, you could say that I was very lucky.”
“Gran Turismo was the first project plan I created out of close to 100 others I came up with when I first started my career in this industry,” he notes. “If a plan for something other than a racing game had been the one that was approved, there is a good chance that I might have been making a title other than Gran Turismo today.”
We’re certainly glad that didn’t happen! GTPlanet will be marking the 25th anniversary of Gran Turismo in a special post on Friday, December 23, but in the meantime tanjobi omedeto, Gran Turismo!
