Gran Turismo 2
Eternal Cuddly Game #7
Type of Game
A massive showcase for displaying your virtual cars. It’s a racing game, mind you, but really it’s just an excuse to show off your virtual cars even more afterwards!
Release date on our machines
January 2000 – in reality, the nineties were still very much in the air for much of the year.
Developer
Polyphony Digital Inc., which has only just broken away from Sony.
Publisher
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd., which… er, well, clearly didn’t hold it against Polyphony for leaving.
Gran Turismo 2: available on nothing other than the good old PS1. Well, yeah – with all the sequels still coming out, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
It took me a while to discover the very first Gran Turismo. It was down to getting a PlayStation very late in the day at mom's, and the fact that it wasn’t my console, so I wasn’t really allowed to do what I wanted with it yet. So I threw myself headlong into PC games, hoping not to hear too many gushing stories from mates who were having the time of their lives playing this or that crazy game on the Sony machine. Fortunately, my stepdad was a fan of fast cars and, having seen the game running at my mate Lionel Mortadelle’s place, he bought it and gathered everyone round the telly to show us a “proper racing sim”, not all that unrealistic stuff. I never knew which games he was referring to when he talked about this completely unrealistic stuff, but clearly it bothered him quite a bit. He’d probably just read the blurb on the box and nothing else, that village idiot. My mom left the room without a word before the intro had even finished; halfway through the first race, my little sister Rebecca sat back down at the computer to launch Adibou 2; and Elena, the eldest, well, I don’t think she was even in the flat. Anyway, I put up with my stepdad’s presence all on my own, spellbound by this new gaming banger.
First on the second
I, too, had already fallen for it when I saw Lionel burning rubber behind the wheel of his Castrol Supra – the best car in the game, according to him. Anyway, a year later, I nearly lost my mind when the second instalment came out. This time, there was no question of watching it from afar for months on end; I bought it straight away (well, as soon as I could, in the Gold or Platinum version, or something like that). And to make up for not having been the first to get my hands on the first one, I was going to lose myself in the second one like never before!
Dual content injection
It didn’t look promising at first, though. I’ve never been too keen on racing games. Before I got hooked on GT, long before I discovered Mario Kart 64, I’d had a bit of a laugh smashing up cars in Destruction Derby 2 (the PC version, as I didn’t have a PS1, obviously), and I’d been thrashed a thousand times over by the AI in Super Monaco GP on the Mega Drive. I was far more into RTS and management games, where tanks moved a fair bit slower, after all. Yes, sure, the Nod motorcycles from Command & Conquer would beat a Toyota GT One any day, as would half the planes in Total Annihilation. But actually, Gran Turismo is far more about management than we were led to believe! Who tried to make us believe anything? No one, I’m just making up these revelations to convince myself of… well, I don’t really know what either. Still, a simple racing game, however close to a simulation it may be, wouldn’t let us get lost in a sea of models and brands, fifty types of rims, ten different types of brakes or suspension!
Races are only there to make money, which we then use to pimp our new cars with the upgrades we’ve just fitted. We’re offered licences to pass, various championships of varying degrees of difficulty and complexity, but the heart of the matter, the very essence of the concept, is building a garage filled with the craziest cars ever made, just to show off. And in the second instalment of the franchise, we come across loads and loads of mad cars. Lots of battered chassis too, like that 1.6L model from ’91, and the same one, but a 1.8L from ’92. But let’s focus on the mad cars. Not only from Japan, as in the first game, but also from Europe and the United States! Bring on the Aston Martins, Chevrolets, Porsches (renamed RUF, no doubt for copyright reasons) as well as… Fiats and Peugeots, well. My favourites? The Cerbera LM Edition, the Viper GTS Team Oreca, the Lancia Stratos, the Mitsubishi 3000GT LM Edition 99, and pretty much every Nissan Skyline in the game.
After that, my life’s goal was to get a Skyline when I grew up. Then I grew up, and I stopped acting like a show-off with my souped-up car, so I ended up inheriting the Fiat Panda from my neighbours, Nelson and Mortimer Paprika. It wasn’t as cool as Dragon’s Fury on the Mega Drive, although… depending on your point of view, it could give it a run for its money. So, I loved collecting cars, but I loved tuning them to the max even more, and even more than that, I loved enhancing them with the ultimate feature: the racing modification, which added a wing, spoilers and stickers. Most cars had this option, even the most battered wrecks, and it made them all look SO GOOD! Yeah, even an old brown Sedan with slightly lighter brown stripes stuck on it. I never knew if it boosted performance, but if I ever find out it didn’t, a whole part of my existence would crumble.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
With all the upgrades maxed out, we’d sometimes hit absolutely insane figures – 900 horsepower or even more. Thankfully, the major flaw in Gran Turismo 1 has been sorted out – the one that meant our power-hungry behemoths took ages to start up. Yeah, if you think about it for another couple of minutes, you realise you’re not even getting a management game, just a collection game. A sort of early Dokkan Battle, with four-wheeled rockets instead of Super Saiyans, where 5% of what you own is enough to take on the game’s content. It’s a shame our garage doesn’t hold more than a hundred cars. I learnt this the hard way, mind you, when, in a fit of greedy madness (the same one that had already got the better of me in U.N. Squadron), I decided to buy the thousand-odd cars that exist in the game. I reckon the crestfallen look on my face when I read the message in question was worth a look.
Luckily, no one saw. Yet another imaginary achievement to cross off my dream wishlist. What a let-down. “The Real Driving Simulator”, as it says in big letters on the box. Haha! We really believed it back then. Even in 2000, that slogan was blatantly lying to our faces. When you can win an entire championship by skimming the walls at 250 km/h, including through hairpin bends, without blowing up your TVR Speed 12, there’s grounds to sue the developers for false advertising. But hey, we didn’t care with the lads, it made us laugh, and it let us rake in the cash without too much effort. That didn’t stop the franchise from establishing itself as the gold standard for years, and a whole host of games drew inspiration from GT in the hope of staying on the road (hey, is that a racing driver’s joke or what?).
That game also left a lasting impression on me. Whereas I’d previously regarded all cars as endless variations on the same metal box, I developed a sort of sixth sense that allowed me to recognise the brand and model of any car I passed in the street, in a fraction of a second. It also made me so daft that I stole a tuning magazine from a campsite shop during a summer holiday. The only thing I’ve ever stolen in my life: a tuning magazine, featuring a fluorescent green Golf IV with a sill ten centimetres above sea level. There’s a lot of sadness and unhappiness in that, I swear. Maybe I should have played The Sims instead of making fun of my little sister Rebecca when she was trying to build a house that wouldn’t catch fire at the slightest provocation. That might have made me a model citizen when it came to managing my life, who knows. Or I might have ended up as a thoroughly corrupt estate agent, who knows.
Two-wheel drive
This game has two very distinct musical styles. The first consists of the elevator music that accompanies the player through the various menus. It’s part of Gran Turismo’s somewhat endearing identity, to put it kindly. I’ve grown rather fond of it, but I’d be lying if I said it gives me the daily dose of nostalgia my body needs to function properly. Listening to these little tunes that smell of new seats and fresh engine oil, typical of every Norauto garage in France, barely keeps me going. Fortunately, that’s not where the real appeal lies. In fact, it’s during the races that your ears really get a treat; the least they could do, really. Even though, strictly speaking, I prefer the OST of the first Gran Turismo today—a tad grittier and more edgy—the one from the second game was the epitome of cool when it came out. Much like those of Tony Hawk and Little Big Planet, it serves as an exception to my aversion to soundtracks composed of tracks borrowed from various artists, compared to albums specifically created with the video game in mind. We’re then treated to a feast of rock, electro, drum’n’bass… sometimes all three styles blended into a single track, and in an atmosphere that only the late 90s could produce. All right, if people ask me enough times, I suppose I can admit it didn’t always turn out for the best. But thanks to feelings like wallowing in melancholy, dwelling on the past, and idealising childhood, well, yes. You can convince yourself there was nothing better than that. Right, here I go, dancing and crying at the same time. Leave me alone. In any case, when that particular track blared out at the start of a circuit packed with V12 engines, you knew you couldn’t lose. Even if it meant skimming the walls.
Gran Turismo, best friend edition
My love for Gran Turismo 2 stems from another twist of fate: the new friends I made at the end of secondary school. It was a bit of a forced move, really, coming as it did after I’d been kicked out of my first group of mates, for a reason that still eludes me to this day. In fact, I simply joined Randall Geyser, who’d been properly kicked out a few weeks before me and had done all the groundwork beforehand. Among these new faces was Leyland Lampion, with whom I’d already had a good laugh in Year 6 during the school ski trip. We found ourselves stuck in the middle of a stationary chairlift, and we sang our own improvised remix of "Les Bronzés Go Skiing". We’d whisper “Quand te reverrai-je?”, then shout “JARDILAND JARDILAND!” Why Jardiland? I’ve no idea; we never spoke again after that, until I crashed into his circle of friends four years later. Then again, “Jardiland Jardiland” – we’d laid the foundations, hadn’t we? Leyland had a PlayStation, naturally, and he loved Gran Turismo. We shared a passion for the game together, cheering each other’s achievements, approving the purchase of some new mega-fast car or the addition of some super-aggressive turbo… and finishing the game at 103.9%, or something like that. But there was still one final task left to complete: winning the last car in a championship, in order to bag every possible prize the game had to offer. A one-in-four chance of getting it as a victory prize. So one Saturday evening, sometime in the spring or summer of 2000, with my mum and stepdad away for the whole weekend, Leyland turned up, DualShock controller in hand, determined that we should reach the pinnacle of our young careers as Gran Turismo-addicted teenagers. We set off at the wheel of the Suzuki Escudo Pikes Peak Version (a sort of spaceship on wheels that hits 400 km/h) and off we go. Without any trouble, we win once, twice. OK, bad luck. Then five, six, ten times.
Right, it’ll take us all night, but we’ll get there! Just one little problem, from the lofty heights of our fourteen-and-a-half-year-old selves: we’d drunk a whole bottle of cheap gin between the two of us. And I ended up spending the rest of the night with my head in the loo, with a bit of poo floating just a few inches from my nose. Yeah, Leyland emptied the cistern, in between my bouts of vomiting! And the worst bit is, we never managed to get hold of that car! Not even in the weeks that followed, not even after retrying the same level a hundred and fifty times. We eventually convinced ourselves it was a bug, which allowed us to move on without wallowing in the deepest despair. Still, that little blemish on our otherwise perfect record really gritted my teeth for a long time. Until Gran Turismo 3 came along, that is – on Leyland’s PS2, of course.
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