GT5 Madrid Launch Party

I was fortunate enough to attend the Gran Turismo 5 launch party in Madrid last November and, though I took lots of photos, I didn’t have any good video to share. Fortunately, before the festivities kicked off, I met up with InsideSimRacing’s European correspondent Andreas Nie, who captured plenty of great footage at the event and around the city. After the press session, I sat down with Andreas to talk about the event and my personal first impressions of the game. It’s all in ISR’s latest video feature, published yesterday and embedded above.

IDC Models, the rapid prototyping and model making division of Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC), has just completed a prototype of a radical new concept race car, which comes straight from the mind of one of the world’s top F1 car designers, Adrian Newey, Red Bull Racing’s Chief Technical Officer.

First, the good news:  Yamauchi announced at yesterday’s press Q&A session that many updates and patches will be issued at the “first of December” (though it wasn’t entirely clear to me if that literally meant December 1st or early within the month). Polyphony Digital has also posted this notice on their website to reassure us that the game’s online services will continue to be optimized and upgraded to handle the additional load generated by players around the world.

I just got in from the Gran Turismo 5 launch party here in Madrid – packed with media representatives from around the world, it was a fitting way to celebrate the end of GT5’s long and dramatic development. Here’s what I learned:

The international Gran Turismo 5 launch party is here, and GTPlanet readers have a front row seat to all the festivities! I’ll be sharing lots of pictures and news from the event on Twitter and Facebook, so keep a close eye on my updates over the next few hours.

I’m very excited to announce that I will be personally attending the Gran Turismo 5 Launch Party in Madrid, Spain, this Wednesday, November 24th! Sony has been keeping very close wraps on what’s in store for the event, but it’s definitely going to be very big, and very special… It’s more than just a party, and should be a real treat for all automotive enthusiasts and the general public – be sure and stop by if you’re in the area.

Much like Polyphony Digital’s Citroen GT, it looks like the Red Bull X1 Prototype will also be transitioning from the virtual world into reality – sort of. This is actually just a model, but these pictures from the latest edition of Evo Magazine make it easier to imagine what the real thing could actually look like.

I don’t have any specific updates about the GT5 disc revealed yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped quite a few interesting tidbits from bubbling up around the world. First up, word from “distribution sources” indicate more than half a million copies of Gran Turismo 5 are headed to France. More specifically, there will be 450,000 standard copies, 100,000 Collector’s Editions, and 5,000 Signature Editions available in the country. (Amazon.fr is still taking SE reservations, so hop on that if you’re interested.)

Gran Turismo 5 will be officially unveiled at an exclusive European launch party in Madrid, Spain, on October 26th and – if you’re creative enough – you can be part of it! Sony is hosting a contest on Facebook (open to residents of UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal), inviting you to re-create the game’s Photo Travel mode in real life, with your own ride: