I love driving games. More often than not, my goal when I fire up a video game is to relax. I’ve had a long day and have probably been reminded for the umpteenth time that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, that most guardrails on which we rely are entirely imaginary, and that a large swath of this population doesn’t possess a single empathetic muscle in their body. In these moments, I’ll sometimes fire up a driving game and bang out lap after lap, fully immersing myself in a world in which I’ve made it as a race car driver, rather than occupying the real world in which I decided at the age of eighteen that climbing the corporate ladder is how I wanted to spend my best years.
It’s with this context that I became giddy at the prospect of playing the newest entry in the Gran Turismo series when Gran Turismo 7 was announced in June 2020. Immediately, I was flooded by the memories of playing Gran Turismo 3 on my PlayStation 2 back in 2001 – I was in 5th grade back then, and my biggest problem was trying to figure out how to get my crush to notice me or how to put off my entire 30-minutes worth of social studies homework.
Life is supremely more complicated now. Why am I here? Why does each and every single day feel so long? How does someone take life day by day, week by week, year by year, without becoming chronically and flagrantly hopeless? And, if hopelessness is a feeling to which we can all relate, I ask again: why are we here?
It’s with this heaviness that I retreat into Gran Turismo 7. The allure of jumping into a Toyota Supra and doing laps around Suzuka is tantalizing. There’s a certain rhythm to driving games that feels hypnotizing. As you familiarize yourself with a track, and as you get further into a stint, you start to more precisely nail down when to press down on the brakes, when to feather the throttle, and when to absolutely press down on the accelerator. You get lost. You stop relying entirely on braking points and start subconsciously listening for audio cues as well: the pitch of the engine when you need to press the brake pedal, the amount of time that you’ve heard wind rushing outside of your cockpit, the number of objects that have whooshed past you as you hurtle down a straight.
The world of GT7 is a beautiful one. It is conceptually beautiful, as the game drapes you in a blanket of romanticism while describing the history of various automotive manufacturers and celebrating the artistry of different vehicle designs. The world is also aesthetically beautiful; the team at Polyphony Digital has paid a tremendous amount of attention to how these cars look in the real world and faithfully recreated them in the game. I don’t just mean that they’ve faithfully recreated minute details of each car. There is also a tremendous amount of attention paid to how cars interact with their environments; for example, the team has individually simulated the base paint, metallic coat, and clear coat on a Corvette, which allows for realistic reflections and diffusion of lighting on the vehicles in the game. Gran Turismo 7 is the first game I’ve played where I find myself actually watching parts of my race replays, for no reason other than this game is a sight to behold.
It’s important to note that GT7 does have some semblance of a progression system. At the outset of the game, you’re invited to select one of three starter vehicles: a Honda Fit Hybrid, a Toyota Aqua S, or a Mazda Demio. You’re then taken to a cafe to meet the owner, Luca, who, like you, is a gearhead. In fact, everyone in this world seems to be obsessed with all things automotive. This isn’t dissimilar from the pervasive automotive enthusiasm that permeates through the Forza Horizon series, although I find Gran Turismo’s presentation of this world to be substantively less grating on account of the lack of EDM festival atmosphere that couches everything.
Quite quickly, Luca starts to present you with challenges, which GT7 houses in things called menu books – most often, these challenges are to unlock this car or that car, which you can achieve by heading to circuits around the world and finishing on the podium in various races.
While there is a deep roster of cars available in Gran Turismo 7, the game does hand them out quite easily – progression never feels particularly difficult. Even when you need to secure a certain license in order to be admitted to a championship series, the game lets you achieve said license by just getting bronze trophies in the ten requisite challenges. I was often able to achieve bronze trophies on the first attempt although, if you’re like me and have a brain rot that won’t let you move on from each challenge until you’ve received a gold trophy, then you’re going to be in for a tougher slog.
And this, essentially, is the rhythm of GT7 – Luca gives you a menu book, most of which invite you to unlock a group of three cars. You head to the world map to achieve a podium position in three different races. You unlock the needed cars, head back to the cafe, and hear Luca give history on what you’ve just unlocked before he hands you a new menu book. Rinse and repeat.
This summary cheapens the beauty of Gran Turismo 7 and that’s intentional. After spending about ten hours in the game, I realized that, while I was enjoying the game overall, it wasn’t scratching the particular itch that I had. Why could that be? I certainly wasn’t dissatisfied with the game’s presentation, nor was I dissatisfied with the racing itself. The progression was easy to achieve.
And then I realized that I was on a different type of ladder.
I have spent the last ten years working through a different type of progression, moving from job to job and company to company, picking up increasingly senior roles and congratulations from those around me along the way. I’ve also spent the last year identifying the unsatisfying undercurrent that those actions have introduced to my adult life and grappling with how to better integrate that into the, in theory, five-or-so decades that I have left on this earth.
I took that same attitude into the game. You don’t have to complete Luca’s given menu books; you certainly can take a break and run an arcade race at Daytona for no other reason than wanting to run laps around one of the most iconic superspeedways in the world. But, I didn’t do that. Without thinking, I dutifully received the latest menu book from Luca and got to work, unlocking car after car and generating credits in my bank account that I wasn’t spending.
I entered 2022 with an intention to just be. Throughout my entire adult life, I’ve been driven to achieve this thing or that thing, whether it be securing a promotion at work, securing a position at a new company, or pursuing a post-graduate degree. In retrospect, I don’t think that I can tell you why I did any of that. I guess I had a vision that reaching those finish lines would place me in the territory of “being happy.” It wasn’t until I reached my thirties that I realized that I’d crossed multiple finish lines in the previous decade and didn’t feel particularly happy with any of it.
Of course, there’s a position of privilege there. While I didn’t feel particularly happy with any of it, it’s also true that I was free from the suffering caused by living paycheck to paycheck and free from the stress of not knowing how or if you’re going to make rent next month. With those important needs met, I knew that I wanted to stop chasing and that, instead, I just wanted to exist. I wanted to be present in my environment and take time to really notice what’s around me. It’s not lost on me that tomorrow really isn’t guaranteed; there is a genuine non-zero chance that I’m dead tomorrow and while it’s difficult to live each day as if it’s your last, I desperately want to avoid reaching my final moment and feeling unsatisfied with how I’ve lived.
In the context of GT7, then, I realized that all that I had wanted to do is drive and get lost. I didn’t want to spend my time slogging through challenges or heading to a basket of circuits because the game wanted to impose linearity. Instead, I wanted to look at the world through the windshield of a car that I’ll never be able to afford and exist in that world with a singular focus: journey. And so, I found myself returning to one of the greatest driving games of all time: OutRun.
Released in 1986 as an arcade cabinet, OutRun was developed by a team at Sega led by Yu Suzuki. While he’d developed other racing games in this era, notably the motorcycle racer, Hang-On, he and Sega were unable to overtake Namco and their dominant arcade racer of the time, Pole Position.
In an effort to rectify this, Suzuki set out to create a new driving game based on his love of the film Cannonball Run. For those unfamiliar with the film, Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and more, comprise a star-studded cast in this movie about a race beginning in Connecticut and taking drivers across America before ending in California.
While the practice of game developers traveling to real-world locations for research is now relatively commonplace, this was not the case in the early 1980s. It’s impressive, then, that Suzuki conceived of the idea to take his own cross-country road trip to generate inspiration for his game and make sure that his vision for OutRun felt real. Initially, he intended to drive across America but, after realizing that American scenery isn’t particularly varied between the coasts, he elected to journey across Europe instead.
“Because of the ‘transcontinental’ concept, I felt that I should first actually follow such a course myself, collecting information with a video camera, a still camera, and other equipment. I started out from Frankfurt, where I hired a rent-a-car, and I installed a video camera on the car. I drove around Monaco and Monte Carlo, along the mountain roads of Switzerland, stopping in hotels in Milan, Venice, and Rome, collecting data for a fortnight. I have many happy memories of that trip”
This focus on journey defines the finished product that so many people experienced in arcades around the globe in 1986. OutRun doesn’t feel like a racing game – it feels like a driving game. And here is where I’m able to finally scratch the itch that I’ve been feeling. OutRun is not a game about beating opponents to the finish line, nor is it a game about setting blistering lap times.
Instead, OutRun puts you at a start line and invites you to simply drive through the landscape. You begin at a beach side town and immediately upon crossing the start line, you see cars traveling on the same road on which you drive. But, unlike the cars you’d see in a racing game like Pole Position, these are trucks and passenger vehicles that are quite distinct from your Ferrari Testarossa; these cue you to know that you aren’t in a race but, rather, driving along public roads like the ones on which you’ve found yourself countless times throughout your life.
OutRun is love on a screen. As with the team at Polyphony Digital, Yu Suzuki, too, is an admirer of vehicles. While the only vehicle that you can drive is your Ferrari, Suzuki had initially intended to let the player select from one of eight vehicles whose stats would differ based on real-world driving capabilities. When it became clear that the Ferrari would be the only vehicle in the game, Suzuki rounded his team into a car and drove to see a real-world Testarossa in order to photograph it and record its engine sounds. In the game, Suzuki ensured that the Ferrari had weight to it. This car doesn’t turn on a dime; you’ll need to use your brakes and feather the throttle if you intend to make it to the end of your journey. If you don’t, you could find yourself spinning out or rolling the car over.
I found myself spending hours driving through the different stages in OutRun. It’s important to remember that OutRun is an arcade game; it only takes about six minutes to reach the finish line to increase the frequency with which either you drop another quarter into the machine or the person in line behind you steps up and inserts a quarter. However, with sixteen unique routes that you can take with the different forks in the road that the game places along your path, it’ll take you about an hour and a half (and, at least sixteen quarters) to see everything.
I have spent hours driving my Ferrari Testarossa through the various landscapes in OutRun and I find that the way that this game presents itself to be mesmerizing. As is the case with Gran Turismo 7, OutRun is a love letter to the automotive world. But, while GT7 embodies that love by shining a spotlight on the oft-overlooked details and history of a class of vehicles, OutRun embodies that love by successfully conveying Yu Suzuki’s happy memories of his transcontinental European drive.
Gran Turismo 7 is a wonderful video game. The team at Polyphony Digital truly come across like admirers of the automotive world and the passion is infectious. Anytime someone stops you and earnestly tells you “this thing is beautiful, this thing is important, this thing can stimulate your soul,” I would encourage you to listen to them. GT7 romanticizes the freedom that you can capture by racing cars; an indulgent act, given that the vehicles cease to have utilitarian function and instead become outlets for competition. Today, however, I don’t want to compete; I just want to be.