The Last Man on Earth You Want Working to a Tight Deadline

If it took 5+ years to make one of these, there’d be no Ferrari

Kazunori Yamauchi, father of all things Gran Turismo (and Sky Blazer alas!) is, quite literally, the last person I’d ever hire to work to even a loose deadline, let alone one that would have cost me north of $60 million dollars (at last count some time ago) over the course of five, long, years¹:

“About 90 per cent of the game is done,” Yamauchi told Inside Line (thanks VG247). “We are just working on the last 10 per cent and polishing up everything.”

Which would be fair enough, except it’s exactly what he said in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And indeed roughly what he said in October.

Now I don’t care about this game at all, and I understand the idea of ‘not rushing perfection’², but someone at SCE should have, years ago, put the brakes on this out-of-control, high spec, game development type R if only because it probably could have shipped, well, years ago, collected rave reviews, sold millions, helped the PS3′s flagging fortunes and had a sequel ready to go this year.

Instead, they let the raving eccentric go on and on and on and on with no real end in sight and is, yet again, a microcosm for the serious problems Sony has had for 90% (see what I did there?) of this generation. (This is assuming, of course, Yamauchi doesn’t have pics of Howard Stringer caught using a Samsung TV at home or other, compromising, material like that Kaz Hirai’s biz degree³ is, based on SCE’s performance, from Okinawa CC.)

I think it’s even fair to ask if this game is going to make 2010, at this point, and you can pretty much write off Europe right now as the game powerslides into its eighth(!) year in development on its 3.6 millionth set of tires.

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1 Did I mention that was five, long, years as of 2008? No. Oh, well, there you go.
2 There’s not rushing and there’s a laconic, eh, we’ll get it done when we get it done attitude that seems to infect high grade Japanese devs and leads, ultimately, to their destruction See: Suzuki, Yu and the debacle saga that was Shen Mue.
3 Haha, just kidding! Kaz has a Bachelor of Arts degree.