The mantra, sex sales has long been applied to products, movies, and video games. Get an attractive model to pitch the product or offer a steamy scene to pull in the young viewers. Video games have heavily utilized sex to sell all kinds of genres, from beach volleyball to killing zombies with a chainsaw. Of course, we can expand from the pure definition of sex and instead create sexier products. Sleeker, more refined, and smoother are all words that tend to correlate with the word. According to Gran Turismo creator and car/racing fanatic, Kazunori Yamauchi, its time for Gran Turismo to get sexier when speaking to GTPlanet. After the jump, his statement.

 “My perspective is that the sounds in Gran Turismo are just too real. With the recording method we use, we use a dyno and put the load on, and the sound we produce is just too accurate. I think it would be a good thing to sort of design the sound a little bit, and so that is something I would like to challenge ourselves with in the future.

What I find is that one of our themes with Gran Turismo is to create something that is real; that is what our team is focused on, but that can be an issue sometimes as well. If we see something in front of us, we try to reproduce that very accurately, and that tendency is getting stronger.

But, I think we maybe need to make things sexier sometimes, and I think that is something the Gran Turismo team might need to work on. It could also be because our team is growing in number, which could be one of our barriers to that goal.” 

When it comes to interviews conduct in other languages which are then translated, a lot can get lost but I get the feeling that the team at Polyphony Digital wants GT6 to be slicker, more Westernized like Need for Speed and I’m not sure that’s the answer. I highly doubt the reason GT5 sold only 5 million instead of 6 million (made up numbers to make a point) is that the exhaust tones of the BMW M3 were too realistic. In fact, the reality of it is that most of us don’t have the Porsche GT5 steering wheel and a 6.1 THX surround sound to get what the masterful series offers.

Instead, what makes the Gran Turismo series so beloved is its strive for reality. So while there is room for improvement, I don’t think Westernizing the game which has been the answer for Japanese game developers to address sagging sales is the answer to improving the game. I’m with the fans, give us GT6 with even more realistic graphics and physics, throw on some good tracks, reduce load times and make for a more compelling campaign and online component and you have yourself 6 million sold copies.

Discuss:

Does the Gran Turismo series need to get sexier to sell more and expand to a bigger audience?