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Kazunori Yamauchi

Talking the torque.

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Image credit: Eurogamer
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Interview by Johnny Minkley Contributor
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Despite spending over five years making it, Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi still isn't happy with his latest creation. But it is finally here and at the official launch for the game last night in Madrid, Yamauchi turned up with a garage-load of supercars and a wide grin of relief.

After telling us "today is only the beginning" for the game, Eurogamer grabbed some time with Mr GT to find out what this means, and what's next.

Eurogamer The game's finally out today. What took you so long?
Kazunori Yamauchi

We really wanted to make it incredible, and to make something incredible just takes time. But it's still not perfect.

Eurogamer What's not perfect? You said on stage you're going to be upgrading every week, every month – what specifically do you want to work on?
Kazunori Yamauchi

That's sort of a surprise we're keeping for the future. Once games go online it's no longer the type of thing where you just make it, hand it over to the players and they go out and play it. Games will keep evolving.

Now it's released we're going to have several million people who'll become citizens of Gran Turismo. From here on we have to listen to their voice and see what they want and change the game accordingly to match their needs. So Gran Turismo really is just at the starting point, it's really the beginning and we're just going to evolve from here.

Taking on the Top Gear test track.
Eurogamer You've been working on the game for over five years. How hard was it to say 'we've done enough'? Would you have liked more time?
Kazunori Yamauchi

Of course that's true and it would have been nice to have more time, but at one point we have to release the game because my imagination alone is not enough to make the game evolve to where we want it to go. We really need to listen to the voice of our citizens and see what they want out of the experience and evolve with that.

Eurogamer On a specific note, will you be adding online matchmaking soon?
Kazunori Yamauchi

In this release we focused on the features that allow close friends to race together. Online updates are planned of course for leaderboard and matchmaking - [they're] all planned in the process of evolution.

Eurogamer You are a perfectionist, you've said the game isn't perfect – but what do you think is GT5's greatest achievement?
Kazunori Yamauchi

I think it's the overall packaging of the game I'm really proud of. GT integrates a lot of different features, whether it be the graphics or the physics - it evolves a lot of different things. Really integrating that together in a clean package was a difficult process and I'm really proud we were able to do it.

Making tracks with GT5.
Eurogamer Looking ahead, Gran Turismo 6: will that be on PlayStation 3 or the next console?
Kazunori Yamauchi

10 years ago it was easier to predict what would happen three years in future. Nowadays no-one knows what happens in the future. In three years, we don't know what will happen.

Eurogamer So you're not sure that it'll be a PS3 game?
Kazunori Yamauchi

[Laughs and shrugs]