Gran Turismo 6 is out today, and Polyphony Digital boss Kazunori Yamauchi has described teams thought process when developing the racing circuits for the Moon.
In the racing simulator, players can drive a lunar rover across the moon’s surface.
“We had been working for a while on simulating the stars properly in the game, and the moon was being recreated very accurately,” said Yamauchi to the PS Blog. “While we were working on that, the idea just came out of the blue. We thought, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if you could drive on the surface of the moon?’ So we did some research into the lunar rover and thought we should make it available in the game to drive.
“It was something we knew we could do with the technology that we had. It was really born out of curiosity. And if you remember in the opening movie, the opening music is Rachmaninoff and the theme of that piece is ‘the moon’. Things just connected one after another.
“Researching the geography of the moon’s surface and going back and looking at the actual routes that Apollo 15 took was actually a lot of work!” insisted Yamauchi-san.
“It was a difficult process but we did as accurately as we could possibly manage.
“The objectives of Gran Turismo are very simple actually. We want people to enjoy the beauty of cars, we want people to enjoy driving, and we want people to enjoy the beauty of the environments. Those are things that have remained the same throughout the series, and it’s the same for GT6.”
