Two years ago, on November 24th – 2010, Sony’s premier racing game: Gran Turismo 5 was released. It was an immense success, but what most of the people don’t know is the degree of time and effort it took for Sony and Polyphony Digital to reach this point. Let’s take a look at Gran Turismo’s history.

It was 1998, when the racing games were hitting the shelves for the first time. Yeah, I remember that there were even older games, such as; TD 3 Car, but that didn’t count as a driving or racing game because of its nonexistent graphics. I’m talking about Mario Kart, Need For Speed and Twisted Metal. What do these games have in common? For once, they’re based on an arcade style of gaming. Secondly, those games were focused on wild controls and destruction related stuff.

Things changed in May – 1998, when Sony released Gran Turismo 1 for the Playstation Console. It was originally launched one year ago in Japan – Polyphony Digital created this title for real car racing buffs. It had an incredible deep simulation mode and mind you, at that time, this game was released on a 2 Disc Format. “Multi Disc” games were considered to be a rarity in those games; people regarded them with respect and anticipation.

The main strength of Gran Turismo lineup has always been realistic controls and car physics. The company is still maintaining the same amount of effort, which is why critics and fans have always loved the franchise.

GameSpot’s Vince Broady once said about the original Gran Turismo, “Sony’s foray into the auto-racing category is the equivalent of a ‘mighty blow’ that should snap its competitors to attention, lest they risk being knocked out altogether. [It] presents you with the most realistic, most challenging, and most in-depth racing game currently available for the home market.”

Guys at the GT headquarter pushed the game towards new horizons of realism through the License Test modes. License modes determined a player’s capability of handling a race track difficulty modes. Some player gave up on the entire game just because Licenses were too hard to achieve.

The current version of this game is no less than a wonder. Thanks to millions of fans out there, and the ongoing pursuit of quality improvement, we can say that Gran Turismo is one franchise that gives us tons of reasons to quit on Need For Speed sort of titles.