If you’re reading this, on this website, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Gran Turismo. Whether you’ve turned virtual laps around Trial Mountain or not, the franchise has been a fixture in automotive culture for decades. Yet developer Polyphony Digital is still making the effort to court new players, particularly younger ones. My First Gran Turismo, a free demo version of GT7 that releases on the PlayStation Store this Friday, appears to have been made for exactly that purpose.
Whereas the full Gran Turismo 7 features 522 cars (and counting), My First GT has 18. It also has just three fictional tracks: Kyoto Driving Park Miyabi, Deep Forest, and Trial Mountain. In it, you can earn three licenses; compete in what looks like exactly three races (one for each track); run time trials with local leaderboards; and play “Music Rally,” the strange, mostly forgotten-about mode Polyphony was pushing hard upon GT7’s launch.
If you’re a parent to a small child, I imagine this might actually be a wonderful little game. But for the rest of us, there’s not much here. That’s fine; in retrospect, all of us fans might’ve gotten a little carried away with earlier talk of “favorite cars, tracks, and race events that evoke the nostalgia and excitement of the very first GT experience.” The UI isn’t very evocative of the earlier games, save for the occasional pop of gold in the menus, and the car roster isn’t even that memorable. Here it is below, courtesy of GTPlanet:
- Audi TT Coupe 3.2 V6 ’03
- BMW M3 Sport Evolution ’89
- Citroen DS21 Pallas ’70
- Daihatsu Copen ’02
- Dodge Challenger R/T ’70
- Ferrari 308 GTB ’76
- Honda NSX Type R ’92
- Lamborghini Countach LP400 ’74
- Mazda Roadster (ND) S ’15
- Mazda RX-7 FD Spirit R ’02
- MINI Cooper S ’05
- Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution V GSR ’98
- Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R ’89
- Porsche 911 930 Turbo ’81
- Suzuki Jimny XC ’18
- Toyota Corolla Levin AE86 ’83
- Volkswagen Golf VII GTI ’14
- Volvo 240 SE Estate ’93
Now, there is supposedly a prize if you collect them all, and perhaps that’s where the Castrol TOM’s Supra many of us first encountered in the first Gran Turismo is hiding. Then again, I let nostalgia get the better of me when this demo was first teased, and I’m not prepared to do that again. It does at least support PlayStation VR 2, and perhaps PS5 Pro enhancements as well, so if you’ve got either of those pieces of hardware but not GT7, you can at least revel in the game’s beauty. And if you or your kids enjoy it enough, GT7 just so happens to be on sale for $30 right now.
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