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At first glance, you'd think this documentary film about Polyphony Digital founder Kazunori Yamauchi is just artfully disguised marketing for Gran Turismo. That's because your first glance is of the words "Sony Computer Entertainment presents"; it is just disguised marketing, part of Sony's promo blowout celebrating the series' 15th anniversary and the release of GT6. But that doesn't mean the film doesn't have an interesting subject and a few things to say, although it has some trouble articulating them.Yamauchi is one of the oddest figures in gaming. He's unquestionably an auteur, one of a generation of Japanese game designers - alongside the likes of Shinji Mikami and Hideo Kojima - who have enjoyed unparalleled creative control over huge commercial projects, have been as personally identified with them as a movie director or a rock star would be, and have always pursued a personal vision in their work - sometimes past the point of sense. And yet he works not in cinematic action gaming but simulation; his art is not expressed with flamboyant style, but subsumed in the painstaking work of recreation - of cars, of race tracks, of the physical properties of tyres and suspension rods. He's not interested in creating his own worlds within video games, but in erasing the boundary between games and the real world.
Gran Turismo games overflow with passion for cars and motorsport, but they're also pretty dry experiences, so it's surprising to discover that Yamauchi is not a cerebral technocrat but a sentimental free spirit with a philosophical streak. The most revealing sections of the film show him walking in the woods, reminiscing about collecting bugs with his nature-loving father. He muses that bug collection, driving cars and capturing data are "all connected to the male hunting instinct". He lived free: as a child, he would draw obsessively on the walls of the family home, which his parents covered and recovered with paper for him. As a young man - as our own Martin Robinson discovered in interview with him last year - he was a reckless boy racer.
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