Gran Turismo 6

» see gran-turismo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The PlayStation 4 went on sale in North America on 15 November 2013 and in Europe two weeks after that. Gran Turismo 6 came out on 6 December 2013, on the PlayStation 3. Polyphony Digital had spent most of that console generation on Gran Turismo 5, which shipped late in 2010 after years of delay, and by the time the sequel was ready the hardware underneath it had been superseded. It sold 5.01 million copies regardless, which tells you how much of that audience cared what box it ran on.

Inside was the usual Polyphony inventory problem. 1,200 cars and 30 locations carrying 71 track layouts. Mount Panorama at Bathurst was in there, the first Australian circuit the series ever licensed, and this was also the first Gran Turismo to carry certification from the FIA, which mattered less here than it would four years later. Vision Gran Turismo ran alongside the game: Polyphony asked manufacturers to design concept cars that existed nowhere except inside it, and Mercedes and Volkswagen were among the ones who actually did the work.

The strangest piece shipped almost two years after launch. The GT6 Track Path Editor arrived on Google Play and the App Store in September 2015, a phone app where you drew a road by hand or fed it a GPX or KML file, and the game built a drivable circuit out of the trace. People imported GPS logs from roads they had driven themselves. A racing simulator on an obsolete console was quietly accepting user-generated geography off a phone in 2015.

It launched rough. Metacritic settled at 81 and most reviews carried the same two complaints, that the driving model was the best the series had produced and that the economy sitting on top of it had been tuned by somebody selling credits. Cars cost real money if you were impatient, and the expensive ones cost a lot of it. That argument followed Polyphony into the next two games.

~ the record ~

~ the moon ~

Lunar Exploration was three missions and one vehicle, the Lunar Roving Vehicle LRV-001 that Apollo 15 carried up in July 1971. Polyphony built the course from the traverse the crew actually drove at Hadley Rille, dropped checkpoints along it and gave you a time to beat. The rover barely moves and slides at one sixth gravity, and the missions are timed anyway.

I was twenty nine in December 2013, in Ankara, and I have never owned a PlayStation 3. What pulled me toward reading about this game instead of playing it is the part of Polyphony's work that has nothing to do with racing. A studio spent real effort modeling a vehicle that exists in a single copy, parked on the moon, driven about twenty seven kilometers by two astronauts over three days in 1971, and then shipped it as a side mission in a console game. I build computer vision systems for a living and I know roughly what it costs to model something you cannot go and measure.

~ 28 march 2018 ~

The wind-down came in two notices. Downloadable content stopped being sold on 31 January 2018. The online services ended at 12:00 UTC on 28 March 2018, taking the Community section, open lobbies, Quick Match and Seasonal Events with them.

The Track Path Editor died in the same announcement. It came off Google Play and the App Store that day, and after it, tracks you had already drawn and saved on your own phone could no longer be transferred into the game. The file was still sitting in local storage. There was nothing left to hand it to.

~ what the disc still does ~

Career mode and arcade mode still run, and the moon is still in there, because Lunar Exploration never needed a server. A PlayStation 3 with the disc in it in 2026 is a complete single-player racing game missing only the parts that were rented.

Its successor went the other way. Gran Turismo Sport, released five months before these servers stopped, would not save your progress without a connection at all, and Polyphony only patched that rule out on the day it shut down in 2024. Gran Turismo 6 belongs to the older arrangement, where the online part was an addition to a thing you owned rather than the condition for using it.

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