A special trailer celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Gran Turismo series has been released on the official GRAN TURISMO TV YouTube channel.

It has been 25 years since the original "Real Driving Simulator" launched in Japan on December 23, 1997, and the Gran Turismo series continues to evolve, showing no signs of slowing down.

Whether you were around to experience it back in the early days or not, we hope you will enjoy looking back with us at a quarter century of Gran Turismo memories.

Message from Gran Turismo Series Producer Kazunori Yamauchi

I am very happy that we are celebrating our 25th anniversary since the release of the first Gran Turismo.

Back in 1992, Gran Turismo was the first project I created out of close to 100 others when I began my career in this industry, so it means a lot to me.

While making video games was something I had dabbled with as a hobby when I was 10 years old, I never imagined I would make a career out of it.

I formed a movie production club when I was 14 and produced some movies back then, so I joined Sony hoping to create image products. But the department they assigned me to was not what I was expecting. It was a department where the PlayStation console was just about to start, and it was a place where Kutaragi-san was working feverishly to bring the concept of PlayStation to life.

That place was not where I had hoped to work, but looking back now, you could say that I was very lucky.

I was fascinated by real-time 3D graphics that many had been waiting for. I created and presented plans for all types of video games, not just limited to racing ones, but RPGs, adventure games, action games, puzzle games, and more.

As a result, Gran Turismo was preceded by a race game with a fantasy format called "Motor Toon Grand Prix," which was one of the maiden first-party titles for PlayStation, but if another project other than a racing game had been approved back then, there is a good chance that I might have been working on a title other than Gran Turismo today.

Then, the Gran Turismo project started, with a team of two part-time artists and three engineers.

From there, the number of staffers continued to increase, and it has done so for more than a quarter of a century. Eventually we became an individual company called Polyphony Digital. Today, this company has more than 200 staff members.

I don’t think there are many video game franchises in the world that have continued for 25 years with the same title, not to mention the same team.

The founding members of the company are still working on the front lines, and I am thankful and proud that all 200 members of our staff have the same motivation and love for the company as I do.

In the last 25 years, the cumulative sales total of the series has reached over 90 million copies as of November 16, 2022.

And this result is something that could not be accomplished by ourselves alone.

Behind that 90 million figure, there are all the people of the media who conveyed the allure of Gran Turismo to their readers. There are the people at PlayStation who sold GT for us around the world with passion, and there is the incredible amount of support from the retailers who interfaced with our users.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to all of them for their support.

And above all else, I can’t ever thank enough the GT users and people of the GT community who continually play our new titles, which at times could be said were very experimental. We are here today because of all the people who have supported us.

I believe Gran Turismo has always pursued "beauty:" the beauty of the cars, the beauty of the scenery, the beauty of the lighting, the beauty of driving, the beauty of sounds and music, and the beauty of the graphics.

This "pursuit of beauty" is the motivation for creating Gran Turismo.

We have newfound determination to continue our progress into the future with a strong sense of purpose.

We appreciate all of your support over the last 25 years.

Thank you.