Yamauchi wins race, shows class

Yamauchi wins
Inserito originariamente da Abriael

As reported on the European Gran Turismo website, Kazunori Yamauchi (teamed with the car Journalist Peter Lyon and the well known racing driver Hideshi Matsuda) Managed to achieve a class win on August 29, in the 8th round of the VLN series at the Nurburgring circuit.
It was Yamauchi's first race on an actual racing car (a Lexus IS F) and his third race ever. He also achieved the team's fastest lap of the race.

Now, Gran Turismo fans probably know that Yamauchi's experience as a track driver is very extensive (and it shows in his games), but it's still a massive achievement with someone sporting such a limited experience in actual racing.

While Dan Greenwalt sits on his rear and drools on how is game is so much better than the competition, Kazunori Yamauchi sits at the wheel, and wins races in real life.

His reason for racing? Quite simple: "I wanted to confirm just how effective the experience in the virtual world is, by competing in a race on the Nurburgring. And that includes not just the driving aspects, but on a wider range of things including the building of the car, communication, and much more. And of course, this will all be fed back into future renditions of Gran Turismo. "

It's pretty obvious that this kind of real life experience will help him achieve better results in his game development. It's easier to reproduce something when you have experienced it in real life.

Kotaku reported a quite humble attitude on this matter, as he said that such an amazing result was "unexpected" and that he's just "a game developer that occasionally drives".

The most interesting thing, though, especially in the light of yesterday's post, is what he said about the competition: "I think it's great that the racing game market is getting bigger. It's like if you are a rock fan, you'd like there to be more rock groups. Same idea. That being said, we don't view Gran Turismo as competing with those other titles. We are competing with ourselves."

While Greenwalt spends his time bashing the competition (and Microsoft sends their guerrilla marketers to troll the forums and try to bash Polyphony Digital, full story here), Yamauchi-san thinks on how this competition can open a bigger and better market for his game. Greenwalt tells no competitor is as good as he is, and Yamauchi doesn't think about the competition, but about competing with himself to make the game the best product that it can be. See a trend here?

Learn, Greenwalt. Learn.