Autoweek.com had a great interview with Father of Gran Turismo and the head of Polyphony Digital at SEMA. Here a few excerpts from the interview, but I recommend reading the entire thing over at autoweek.com.
When will you release GT5?
Yamauchi: We will release it in March in Japan but for other regions, it has not been decided yet.
What's holding it up?
That's more depending on SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America) marketing decisions.
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What's taking so long with the product, then?
From our perspective, it doesn't seem like that long a time. To make Gran Turismo 5, we threw away the legacy code from GT4 and started from scratch. It's been five years from [the release of] GT4, and that's the same amount of time it took to develop the first GT4. To create a game from scratch, that's the amount of time it takes to get it right.
How many cars will be on GT5?
I have never actually counted all the cars. I don't have a policy to count them all. We are aiming for 1,000 cars in GT5.
Will those be on the disc when you buy the game or will we have to download them from other sources?
They will all be on the disc.
How do you chose which cars get in the game?
There will be three types: cars we want, the cars the users would like to see in the game and then cars the manufacturers want in it.
How many racetracks do you have in GT5?
There are 20 different environments and around 70 different track layouts.
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What other features will GT5 have?
There will be 400,000 polygons per car, 100 times more than were present on GT4. GT4 had 4,000 polygons per car. You can customize and tune the cars, too.
You have NASCAR and WRC in the game. Does this include the complete list of all tracks in those series?
The NASCAR series is so large it would be impossible to put everything in the game. We will have select courses and select cars in the game. You will also be able to race the stock cars on a number of tracks not found on the NASCAR calendar. In speaking with NASCAR, they said they'd like to see their cars able to race on other tracks, and you can do that [in GT5].
Will you have F1, ALMS or FIA GT?
We had a Ferrari F1 car in the game. For FIA GT and ALMS, we won't have that in the series yet. But we will have a lot of cars that race at Le Mans, so in that sense, there will be cars from ALMS.
Have you played Forza Motorsport 3?
I was watching the guys at our company trying it out in the office. I tried it a little bit. It's very similar in a lot of aspects to Gran Turismo. Some base components of the game are very different from Gran Turismo. It's a little bit different from what a simulator is. You can feel it when you drive it.
Will there be a Gran Turismo 6?
Yes. You won't have to wait as long as you did for GT5. GT5 represents a whole new operating system.GT6 is just new apps that run on the GT5 system.
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What did GT5 cost to make?
[He and translator do some figuring, converting yen to dollars] $60 million. There are other games that cost more. Considering the size and scale of the game, I think it's probably a fairly small amount.
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