Auto Anthro: How Gran Turismo created a generation of gearheads

Jack Swansey holds a degree in anthropology with a focus on car culture, and he is the world’s leading ethnographic authority (by default, if you must know) on NASCAR fandom. His love of the automobile fuels him to discover what cars mean to the people who own, drive, and love them. —EW

“What got you into cars?”

It’s a question I’m asked a lot. Unable to translate into a suitably small-talk-sized answer my decades of passion and fascination with speed, history, and engineering, I usually say, “I don’t really know, I just am.”

But if you were to corner me at a party and press me on the best way for a person to get interested in automobiles, I’d tell you that you should have been playing Gran Turismo 4 in 2006.

In the last Auto Anthro, I concluded that the joys of car culture are the same anywhere in the world. In fact, car culture offers the same joy as any culture: communitas, that feeling of being a part of something greater than yourself. It’s a feeling shared equally by Soviet-era missile engineers fabricating parts for their Moskvitches and 12-year-olds quoting Donut Media on voice chat. I also alluded to the concept of mechanical sympathy, the awareness that a driver is only one part of the complex mechanical (and, increasingly, electrical) systems of the car, and I suggested that somewhere in the connection between those two experiences was the final, magical piece of the puzzle that explains our fascination with cars.

That final puzzle piece can be found in the first place you’d think to look: underneath a Japanese game developer’s desk in the mid-1990s. I’ll explain.

The magnum opus of car-mad game developer Kazunori Yamauchi and his studio Polys Entertainment, (now Polyphony Digital) the original Gran Turismo launched in December 1997 for the Sony PlayStation. It went on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide, becoming, at the time, the best-selling home console’s best-selling game.

Its story has become the stuff of legend. When Yamauchi first pitched “the real driving simulator,” his bosses at Sony turned him down. Undaunted, by day he and his hand-picked squad of 15 developers made two competent if uninspired kart racers under the Motor Toon Grand Prix banner. By night, they built what would become GT. And yes, in the five years it took to bring GT from concept to reality, they often slept under their desks.

Even in 2023, the sheer ambition of their creation is impressive. On PS1 hardware, they crammed in 11 fictional tracks and 140 fully licensed cars, when the same year’s Need for Speed II had just eight tracks and nine cars. The handling model incorporated different tire compounds, turbo lag, and weight transfer over elevation changes. Two years later, Gran Turismo 2 added mixed-surface racing and 410 more cars, and that was that.

In the 25 years since Gran Turismo‘s arrival, across seven mainline games and nine spin-off titles (ten, counting the motorcycle-focused Tourist Trophy), more than 90 million copies have been sold. No other automotive media has had more influence on modern car culture. Sure, the Fast and Furious movies are the six-billion-dollar elephant in the room, but now, as the cars of golden-era Gran Turismo eclipse that magical mark of 25 years, cars-and-coffee lots across the country are filling up with recent adoptees from the Japanese domestic market.

These aren’t just Skylines and Supras, either. The current fad for ’80s and ’90s iron has also swept up oddities like the Nissan Pao, Toyota Sera, and Autozam AZ-1—cars that made their original American debuts decades ago in Gran Turismo 4. They were admired then by the same people who are now taking their Bring a Trailer auctions to the stratosphere.

But the usual story doesn’t answer the question I always like to ask. Why? And, as a follow-up: How? Exactly what about maneuvering a pixelated RX-7 around Trial Mountain turns a person into a lifelong auto enthusiast?

Buckle up folks, it’s about to get anthropological.

In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, political scientist Benedict Anderson laid out his titular theory, a model for national identity that suggests any sufficiently large social group is, to some extent, an imagined experience.

For example, it is impossible for a Green Bay Packers fan sitting in Lambeau Field to know every other Packers fan in the venue personally. But when they look around and see tens of thousands of fellow Cheeseheads decked out in green and gold, or see other fans on TV when watching from home, or even don’t see them but know they’re there, that fan feels communitas.

An “imagined community” doesn’t mean a community isn’t real or isn’t meaningful, it just means its members must sometimes take for granted that it exists—usually because it does.

In the GT games, the main “career mode” experience had players buy a cheap, used car in order to win races so they could afford performance parts and faster cars, which granted access to higher-paying races. Career mode was only available to a single player at a time, and in the first four games, the best-selling and most influential ones, there was no way at all to play online with other enthusiasts around the world. Anderson’s imagined communities model can explain how this lonesome experience still provided communitas.

Not with other players. With the cars.

Human beings are such social animals that even our relationships with non-human objects teem with personification. I’m confident that at least some of you feel personally victimized by your printer. Cars, with their distinctive personalities and rich symbolic potential, are some of the most socially active objects around. That’s why we love them. Gran Turismo created a generation of gearheads by demanding its players develop a social relationship with its cars: imagined mechanical sympathy.

“Be careful going around the corner, as the car will swerve to the left on braking, making it unstable,” advises the intro text to one of GT1’s “license test” challenges. In 19 simple words, it set the players a challenge: To advance in the game, they must develop an intuitive understanding of the principles of weight transfer. Even if it was incomplete, the advice was one of a thousand nudges in the right direction that Yamauchi’s masterpiece made.

It may seem obvious now, but in 1997 it was pioneering: GT created the structure of a role-playing game, with its deep worldbuilding and statistical memorization, out of automotive knowledge. Being a car enthusiast made you better at the game, whether you were anticipating lift-off oversteer from a Toyota MR2 or saving your credits by forgoing the new R33 GT-R for a used WRX and a stage 3 turbo. And even if you didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of mid-1990s Japanese cars, GT was all too willing to teach you, with tutorials describing everything from the handling characteristics of the A70 Toyota Supra to the function of a flywheel, all in a pre-internet era of gaming.

Even the oft-maligned lack of modeled crash damage in the first four GT games worked toward this goal (albeit by happy accident—Yamauchi simply refused to incorporate crash damage unless it could be done perfectly). If the cars didn’t get beaten up, what was the point in a player getting angry, driving around the track the wrong way, and ramming the computer-controlled opponents head-on? And besides, even at age 6, 8, 14, or 40, could you really bear doing that to your Mazda Demio? You know, the car you won from the Sunday Cup, which inspired you to save up your credits in order to splurge on a big turbo and racing tires? It’s not like there were any actual consequences. You could always just restart the race. But that would just feel wrong.

Congratulations, player. You now care about cars. Welcome to the community.

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