We all thought it was photorealistic at the time. On its release in 1997, Gran Turismo shot the racing genre into a higher echelon of fidelity, with incredibly detailed cars and super-smooth replays that seemed almost indistinguishable from watching motor racing on the TV. Well, at least that’s what we thought in 1997.
Looking back now, graphics that were once deemed photorealistic are a lot more pixelly than they appear in our collective memory. But in the context of the time, they were revolutionary. Arcade racers like and had wowed players with their flashy 3D polygon graphics in the early Nineties, which were light years ahead of the pseudo-3D sprite scaling seen in and , released just a few years earlier. provided yet another leap, with shiny real-world cars that convincingly reflected the lights in tunnels, and that rocked and bobbled on their simulated suspensions as they blazed through corners.
