These days, there are certain things we racing game fans take for granted. The inclusion of the Nürburgring Nordschleife, for example. A healthy selection of production and racing cars that doesn’t exclusively focus on one region or time in history, but runs the gamut. How about Photo Mode? These weren’t commonplace in racing games for a long time, but that changed on December 28, 2004, when Polyphony Digital released Gran Turismo 4 in Japan for the PlayStation 2.
GT4 is the GOAT, plain and simple. Sure, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec sold more copies, and the original Gran Turismo on PlayStation allowed sim racing to explode beyond its niche. And yes, PC diehards—GT4 wasn’t the most punishing nor realistic racing game even then, not by a long shot. Its technical deficiencies naturally become more glaring with age, but there are reasons why GT4 is still lauded, while so many of its contemporaries have been forgotten. It’s still the ghost everyone’s chasing, even Polyphony itself.
If I had to sum up why in a word, it would be “soul.” For enthusiasts, GT4 was special because it cast the widest net over this thing we call car culture. Whether you were most excited by ’70s American muscle, Group C endurance racers, or the golden era of JDM, the game had something for you, and that breadth was rare back then.
What’s more, it paid those scenes and eras respect with a thoughtful, attractive interface that oozed style and instilled a sense of exploration, particularly for us younger players who were learning about many of these cars for the first time. You didn’t just go into the “Buy Car” menu and hold right on the D-pad through an alphabetical list of makes and models; you sought out the British showroom, or the Used Car Dealership on that big map and you browsed to a soundtrack of A-tier lounge and jazz.
There was a sense of occasion to the mere act of acquiring a car in GT4. And if you won one that you didn’t know was in the game—because Polyphony Digital cleverly kept some cars hidden from the dealer screen—it was a surprise of the highest magnitude. That brings us to another very special thing about GT4: For all its pedantry, and the adult way in which it carried itself relative to other titles, it was still a game, and it knew that.
You still had to grind for cars you wanted, albeit not as tirelessly as in Gran Turismo 7 before all its updates raised event payouts. You still had to unlock cars and tracks before you had the convenience of being able to drive them whenever you liked. Sometimes, those unlock conditions were absurd, like winning one of the game’s three (count ’em!) 24-hour endurance races. But then you could split driving duties with the B-Spec race manager to lighten the load, and didn’t we all make gratuitous use of that feature?
There were just so many events, too. Today, the single-player component of a game like GT7 or the new Forza Motorsport feels like thoughtless fodder for a shrinking subset of the fanbase that refuses to play online. You’re expected to drive against other humans all the time and like it. Gran Turismo’s computer-controlled pilots have rarely been engaging wheel-to-wheel, but if you play these games to tinker, explore, and drive—if you play them specifically because they give you a path to digital automotive nirvana that doesn’t come solely through sweaty, white-knuckled competition—then GT4 was paradise. With more than 600 individual races in its career mode, and a roster of 730 meticulously recreated cars and 50 tracks, you could play for years and still never finish the damn thing. This was important, because Polyphony wouldn’t finish Gran Turismo 5 until 2010.
It felt like right after GT4, so many things changed. High-definition TVs went from a luxury to the norm. Online multiplayer, too. If a game shipped with a bug, it could just be fixed later over the internet, which led to many, many more games shipping unfinished. And today we also know that updates don’t always improve things. If GT4 was released today, Polyphony would probably patch out that one Costa di Amalfi event that awards you with the Toyota concept rally car that can be sold for 230K-odd credits, and that would make the game worse.
It’s not that GT4 couldn’t be made now; it’s that it wouldn’t. The business of this medium has changed too drastically. So this week, you can be sure I’ll be firing up my copy or perhaps the extensive Spec II mod, reminiscing on that winter evening 11-year-old me waited for my dad to get home from work, because he’d picked up the game. GT4 didn’t come out here in the States until February 22, and I remember having an extracurricular thing that night, which took me away from playing for a few hours. It probably won’t surprise you to know that I was very annoyed about that. The release of a new Gran Turismo was pretty much the most exciting thing that could happen in my life as a kid, and it’s because of experiences like GT4 that it’s little wonder why.
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