Gran Turismo 5
The drive of your entire life.
Kazunori Yamauchi is excited. He's showing us three cars from the 1967 Le Mans 24-hour race - the Ferrari 330 P4, the Ford Mark IV and the Jaguar XJ13 - and they all look beautiful. The P4 is one of Yamauchi's favourite cars of all time.
That's not why he's excited though. He's excited because only two of the cars - the P4 and the Mark IV - actually made it to Le Mans. The XJ13 was cancelled just prior to the race. Yamauchi is excited because now he can finally drive the 1967 Le Mans the way it was meant to be.
Yes, we're at another trade show being taught about cars by Kazunori Yamauchi. He introduces us to the Pagani Zonda R'09 - all Batmobile curves and yellow rims - and reminds us it beat the course record for commercial cars at Nurburgring recently. Then there's the Subaru Impreza Sedan WRX STI '10, and the Lexus IS F Racing Concept '08 - "originally intended for the DTM".
Then we see another veteran of 1967, the Lamborghini Miura P400 Bertone Prototype. "Only two were made, but one was destroyed in an accident. The other car was maintained in pristine condition by JW Marriott in the US, so we went and did a session with his car and perfectly recreated it within the game."
We also see the Monza track briefly - a new course for gamescom - and Yamauchi reassures everyone that the game is nearly finished. "Even as we speak 140 staff back at polyphony are working night and day to finish everything," he says through a translator.
But none of this is why we're here today. We're here to meet "The Red and Blue of GT". The red in this case is A-Spec mode, The Real Driving Simulator, the bit we're all familiar with. The blue is B-Spec - The Racing Simulation RPG.
"In 2001 when I released Gran Turismo 3 it had a name, A-Spec, and that was because I had intended to release a Gran Turismo B-Spec immediately afterwards," he says. "Unfortunately that didn't go too well and though we included this in Gran Turismo 4 experimentally, now we've been able to create what I originally intended. Now this will be included in the game at the same level as A-Spec."
While A-Spec concerns itself with straight-up racing, B-Spec is about managing a team of drivers. Races play out in a "command view" where you can watch one of up to six drivers on your books through a main viewer, keep an eye on tyre wear and relative positions, and issue instructions.