Japan's Game Industry Is Committing Seppuku

I recently made the mistake of trying to play Gran Turismo 6 again. For some reason, I had deluded myself into thinking it's a very good game that I've neglected. Of course, this is false. It's a terrible game that I put down because it's boring and repetitive.


If you haven't played GT5 or GT6, about 80% of the content (nearly 1000 of the ~1200 cars and a similar percentage of the tracks) are literally spruced-up PS2 and PSP content. I don't mean that the tracks and cars are repeats, I mean they are literally using the same geometry, sound files, and textures from earlier games and just processing them through a new rendering engine. Car upgrades are unrealistic (I didn't know a 1968 Shelby GT had an engine computer), customization options are limited mainly to paint color, and a huge portion of the cars are actually just slight variations of a handful of Nissan and Mitsubishi models that Kazunori Yamauchi is in love with. On top of that, the entire games consist of starting at the back of the back and having 3-5 laps to finish first.

If those look look like blurry PS2 textures, it's because they are.

If you ever wondered how PC gamers felt when buying a late-generation console-to-PC port, Gran Turismo 5 gave you a taste.

How did a great series fall so far? I followed a bit of news here and there, and Yamauchi was constantly living a fantasy as a race car driver, spending huge quantities of time test driving exotic cars, taking the whole development team to retreats at race tracks, meeting with car companies to pretend he matters in the automotive world ("Vision GT" was his attempt to get auto manufacturers to treat him like a real car designer), and giving interviews rather than working on either GT5 or GT6.

Yamauchi hard at work not developing games in Paris.

He spent countless hours promoting his idiotic Vision GT idea, flying around the world to sit in automobile cockpits and lovingly caress their interiors (rather than, you know, obtaining CAD data), and fan his balls while blathering about how racing is "poetry" or something. Apparently the poem involves using other cars as billiard balls and not getting deducted points for running off the track or causing collisions, but whatever. Everything except actually producing content for GT was top priority for him, and it showed.

But I'm not here to just talk about Yamauchi. He's symptomatic of a wider problem in Japanese game development, the "game god." In Japan, lead developers who have been around since the cowboy days of console development are revered as infallible sages. Kazunori Yamauchi, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, and others are all examples of the game god problem. These guys all believe in their own myth and are obsessed with their own genius. Each fancies himself some kind of visionary artist savant whose talent goes far beyond merely making video games (Yamauchi fancies himself an elite car designer, Inafune thinks of him as a genius movie director, etc), and since he now has virtually free rein at the company he helped enrich with his earlier games, he inflicts increasingly absurd inanities on customers.

The cult of the game god is bringing down once-legendary game studios. Super Mario Galaxy 2 once again failed to win the audiences, Metal Gear Solid is a self-parody, Final Fantasy is embarrassing, and Gran Turismo is so lazy it makes Need for Speed look innovative.  For some reason, this doesn't happen as much in the USA. Maybe after the public debacles of 3D Realms and Ion Storm, everyone's extremely wary of giving too much freedom to any individual game developer. Maybe the way American corporate law works militates against that. Whatever the reason, Japanese game development is going to continue its downward slide until the cult of the game god gets purged.