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insertcredit.com man of the year, 2004: kazunori yamauchi
by insertcredit.com booth babe of the year, 2004, tim rogers
We call this one
"THE MOST GORGEOUS SITUATION"
So I went to Korea, got my cellular phone stolen, and came back with a new girl on my mind, and a vicious ear infection paralyzing the left side of my head. I kept thinking it'd get better. It ended up not getting better. I ended up almost dying from it. It happened like this:
Brandon Sheffield came to Tokyo, and fucked my life up. His too-honest, too-straight approach to everything blew all my covers with all the girls I'd been deceiving -- and I'd only been deceiving them because I had to, you see; I planned to choose one of them and keep her for a long time, as soon as I straightened a few things out, honest -- and also made me late for the first day of Tokyo Game Show. While he was out on an adventure with a girl I know who likes to snatch my friends away when I'm not looking and take them off on adventures on the West Side of Tokyo, I was at home in hell. I played Dororo all night, that night, with Sensei's daughter. She played as Dororo. I was Hyakkimaru. We got stuck at a boss. I kept leaning my body over to the left side. She was sitting to my right. I leaned all the way left, touching my head to the sofa cushion. She asked me why I was doing that instead of paying attention to the giant demon raping us on-screen. I told her I couldn't control it. She then produced a little black medical book from her duffel bag, and flipped it open to a page on ear infections. That's chuujien in Japanese. She then told me, if I had a shot of whisky, she'd supply the syringe, and she could free me of all my pain. I told her to get serious. She looked me in the eye, and told me she was indeed serious. I told her we had whisky. She said to go get the bottle. I said it wasn't mine, and besides, I didn't drink whisky. She said I didn't have to drink it -- I just had to pour it into my ear. We'd then need some saline to wash it out when all was done.
I should have let her do it.
She's a hell of a girl.
I didn't let her do it. I woke up the next morning feeling like half of my head was missing and the other half was aflame with meningitis. Brandon Sheffield was nowhere in sight. Drew Cosner was drunk as a punk-rock skunk. He had slept too little to be hung-over. He boarded the shower, the door of which has a habit of not opening nicely when it's closed. He got angry that the door wouldn't open, and he pressed his foot against the glass. This didn't work, so he kind of gently kicked it. The door shattered. He cut his foot up to hell and started screaming. Blood was everywhere, he was standing in the living room threatening murder if I looked at his johnson, and I was spinning in my slipper socks. Brandon came in three seconds later with eyes lit up red. My phone rang; it was Chuck Franklin confirming plans to rendezvous at Kaihin-Makuhari Station; he was carrying heavy machinery. I told him we'd be a bit late, and then sneezed. The sneeze clicked. It was red. We picked ourselves up, got on a train, headed north, and ran down some stairs at Musashi-Urawa Station with the intention of changing to the Musashino Line and heading directly into Kaihin-Makuhari. Well, halfway down the stairs, my semicircular canals started the New Year's party three months early, my head turned upside down, and I went wobbly-legged, scurrying down a half a flight of stairs in a posture something like Lupin the Third going down the triangular roof in "The Castle of Cagliostro." Only I didn't end up jumping and springing and flying hundreds of feet through the air. I eventually twisted my ankle, flip-flew up into the air, turned ninety degrees one way, then ninety degrees another, and then hit concrete ten feet below. Brandon came running up to my side.
"You okay?"
I jumped up, wobbling.
"No. Let's go."
We made it on the train. By the time I reached the top of the next flight of stairs, I had assessed my damages -- cracked patella, chipped iliac crest, lacerated chin. The blood had soaked through my jean-knee. A man who couldn't have been older than forty-five grunted, whined, snorted, and nearly spit after offering me his seat. He stood in front of me and clicked his tongue, rolled his eyes, and acted overall dispicable while I rolled up my pant-leg and padded at my blood-caked, hairy leg with one tissue from a package of many handed out by a guy in a reindeer outfit outside a bookstore two weeks earlier.
Nine hours later, Brandon Sheffield came down with a urinary infection, just like I told him he would. <Brandon's note: if tim could truly manifest his will, I actually might have.> Also nine hours later, I, promised Disneyland, was twiddling my thumbs through Polyphony Digital's showing-off of Gran Turismo 4. Guys in suits stood there and talked about the revolutionary new "B-spec" mode, which is so hip that the player doesn't even have to drive. You just choose modes for your driver, like "overtake" or "relax," and you select camera angles. Several girls in "Gran Turismo 4" stewardess outfits (I do much more than merely hesitate to call them "flight attendants") had been parading around, showing off the game before this, thrusting controllers at European journalists best described as "journos." Drew Cosner, now a record-breaking thirty-nine complimentary Kirins into the afternoon, walked up and down the Makuhari Manhattan Hotel Executive Ballroom, cursing and sneering at the girls, their fake enthusiasm for the software on display, and their unabashedly not-orthodontically-blest choppers. I swirled around, trying to answer Chuck Franklin's eager-for-the-scoop questions without sounding snippy:
"What's with this European people and Gran Turismo?"
"I . . . don't know?"
It was a European magazine that had asked me to cover the event, and interview the creator. The creator was Kazunori Yamauchi, insertcredit.com Man of the Year 2004. He came up to the podium in a red, tight-fitting Nike T-shirt and black Nike track pants. Drinking Evian, he discussed some of the new features, beads of sweat on his forehead. One might have been mistaken, and thought he was nervous. I later learned that he'd merely just gone out running before the conference.
After the media talking-to was done and big sites had recorded enough video to offer premium subscribers, Yamauchi retired to the VIP room and got grilled. I played a little GT4 in a custom cockpit, enough to get very dizzy and almost vomit. The girl standing to my left, at one point, grabbed me by the hair to pull me up. I was leaning to the left again. Surprised that she'd touched me, I asked her if she'd grown up in California. This was indeed the case. We talked in English for a while about Chiba. She lived in the area, and was actually an employee of the hotel, not of Sony or of some PR modelling firm. It was kind of interesting. We were speaking Japanese in the end. I asked her, lowering my voice, "Neesan -- ore no koto GOOOOOOOJASU to omousska? GOOOOJASU janai to omousska? Moshi, GOOOJASU to omou nara . . . " ("Big sister, do you find me gooooorgeous. Or do you find me not gooooooooorgeous? If, perchance, you do find me gorgeous, what say . . .")
Drew Cosner grabbed me by the Dr.-Pepper-can-colored shirt collar and pulled me away at this point. He slapped me, hard, on the right side of my face, with his left hand. Some knuckles caught my cheekbone.
"Fucking pull yourself together, man!"
I shook my head from side to side, making my ear sound like popcorn, or else a giant slug slithering across a parking lot covered in broken glass. My lips made a "yabbadiabbityabbada" sound. I wiped sweat off my forehead. I whispered "Whoa." I thanked Drew for the salvation. You're at your lowest, you know, when a slap in the face from a drunk rock-guitarist with a bloody foot actually makes your day better. My god, my head ached. I felt like I hadn't slept in ten days. I really hadn't slept in four. I'd had good curry, though, in the last forty-eight hours, with my friend Jules from Shikoku, via Wales, even though phone calls from the yakuza punctuated that curry meal like needles punctuate tires. The yakuza wanted money for something they were lying about. Hell if I'm going to pay for someone else's lies. I'd end up paying a little bit for it a lot later; I couldn't tell the truth my way out of it.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, hair tussled up like I'd just been wrestling on the carpet with Sensei's dog Tuffy. My shit, my lord, my boaby, I looked -- I looked . . .
"I'm . . . gorgeous!!!"
Again with the slap in the face.
"Look, bitch, you're fucking going on the Tokyo Broadcasting service in twenty minutes, so fucking shape up," Drew told me, himself sweating and eye-watering.
"Da--how?"
"Sony PR lady told you just a minute ago. I took it you weren't listening."
"I -- I wasn't?"
"Yeah, you just kept whispering 'gorgeous' over and over again. It was creepy."
"So wait -- I'm going on TBS? Why?"
"They're filming interviews. Well, just one. They decided to film yours, since you go last. So you have to be all dignified and shit. So, yeah, fucking be cool. Have some water."
I got an Evian and dumped it down my throat in the bathroom. I stripped to my underoos and redressed with a change of more-gorgeous, less-sweat-soaked clothes in my backpack. I applied a little extra wax to my hair. I wiped my forehead with a toilet-seat cover -- excellent at absorbing oil, I have known for some time now, thanks to a girlfriend who hated her oily forehead and felt compelled to always teach me how I, too, could cure an oily forehead in a fancy enough bathroom.
"IF YOU'RE EVER ABOUT TO GO ON TV OR SOME SHIT AND YOU'RE NEAR A NICE ENOUGH BATHROOM HOPE TO FUCK THEY HAVE SOME TOILET-SEAT COVERS, BECAUSE THOSE SONS OF A BITCHES REALLY CLEAN UP THE OIL. IF THEY DON'T HAVE THEM SCREW IT YOU'RE TOTALLY BUSTED BUSTER."
I emerged from the bathroom snapping my fingernails and swinging my toe-tips in time with my hips, with the percussive vocal bridge one minute and thirty-nine seconds into Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" playing in the back of my mind.
"Gotta be cool. Relax. Baby. Get on my tracks. In the backseat. Hitchhike. Take a long ride on a motorbike. Crazy little thing called love. This thing. Called Love. I just. Can't handle it."
I wasn't sure I'd gotten the lyrics right; even so, everything was right in the world. I'd mentally masturbated myself back to top form by staring at my big beautiful bastardly brown eyes in the gold-trimmed mirror, occasionally flipping myself off and copiously whispering "I HATE YOU DON'T YOU MESS THIS UP I MEAN IT." I kept thinking of that girl, that one that gave poor Brandon the infection. What the hell was going on, today? What the hell was up?
Outside, in the ballroom, the very carpet pattern agreed with me. Marble, and high-contrast, it shined up at the ceiling, leaving sunspots on my retina. I tightened my tie, stepped into the VIP room, took a dripping-wet Evian bottle, drank a quarter of it down, straightened my stolen-from-Brandon-Sheffield metal-studded leather wrist bracer, straightened my stole-from-myself metal-studded leather wristband, positioned my High-Lows wristband so that the arrow was pointing "down," which was the direction things were, ideally, going to be going, and told Charlotte Panther -- the best name for a PR person, or any person, ever -- that I was ready to go on. God bless the woman, she didn't bite my head off when I spoke Japanese to the camera crews.
So I sat down in a big red chair -- I think it was red. I don't remember so well (horrible ear infection, fever at around a hundred and five, head full of train schedules and plans that would get me, Brandon, Chuck, and Drew to Disneyland for Koei's party by six) things like colors of chairs. I only remember that Yamauchi was sitting on a sofa across from me, and a hip-looking Japanese-American dude was sitting next to me. Chuck rolled his camera before the TBS guys did. Drew squatted low, hands folded under his chin, some ten feet from my chair. The translator told me to go ahead and tell him what I wanted to ask.
I looked at Yamauchi. He looked at me. He's a hell of a good-looking guy. Looks something like Japanese-rock-star-to-end-all-Japanese-rock-stars, Eikichi Yazawa, in his prime. He has big, glassy, shiny eyes that level very steadily at his partner in conversation. I looked deep into his eyes, opened my mouth, emitted some sound, and then closed my mouth. What was this feeling? Where had it come from? Where was it going to lead me?
"Dobu neeeeeeezumi . . . "
I was whispering a song while staring at Yamauchi's eyes. He let loose in a wicked smirk. The translator half-coughed. I had a flashback to my Hideo Kojima interview. Kojima came into the apartment, shook my hand, sat down across from me in slipper feet, and started sipping some coffee. Yamauchi flexed his thirty-five-year-old arms and took a gulp of Evian.
The aura was too strong. I was faced by a man who emitted something. I wasn't sure what it was. I had never felt this aura before. I dub it "gorjassity." It is the power of rock and roll, the fuel that keeps the universe expanding. And if the universe isn't going to keep expanding, what's the point?
Okay, so I was also half out of my mind.
***
The next day, I'd be talking with a man named Tani. He works in the box-art-checking department at Sony Computer Entertainment, my current section of expertise, and the reason I have so many free games lately, like Square-Enix's Itadaki Street, which is totally a board game starring Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy characters, locations, and music. I showed Tani Yamauchi's business card. He looked it over with wide eyes. I put the card back in my business card case. Tani then gave me one of his cards, saying, with a chuckle, "Please put my card next to his." The chuckle did not indicate he was joking. He was serious. I did as he asked. Tani's card remains in place behind Yamauchi's (in place behind Mamoru Oshii's) in my Final Fantasy XII business card case.
**
At Tokyo Game Show, Gran Turismo 4 was announced as being ready to release on December 3rd -- Yamauchi had chosen the date because it was represented by the numbers 1-2-3, in order, the perfect numerals for the release of a fourth installment to a multi-million-selling series. On December 1st, the game was delayed to December 29th. A friend close to Ken Kutaragi told me that Yamauchi himself phoned Kutaragi, and said "The game must be delayed three weeks." Kutaragi's reply was simple, and not ironic in any way: "I trust you."
**
Back on Day One of Tokyo Game Show 2004, I was leaning all the way to the left, my head nearly touching the chair arm. Drew Cosner, my peripheral vision tells me (damn this excellent peripheral vision; what an insult when my standard vision is so poor), had his head in his hands. Either drunkenness had blest him with narcolepsy or I had gone and embarrassed him with my ear infection. Chuck's camera was still rolling, and Chuck's face was stained with the most electric grin I think I've ever seen on a man who's not animated.
No words, save a whispered song.
Shashiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin ni wa, utsuranai . . . utsukushisa, ga aru . . . kara . . .
Yamauchi leaned to his right, looking eye-to-eye with me. His smirk widened.
The bubble in my Eustachian tube popped, pushed up to the back of my eardrum, and sent ripples down to the base of my head. Like a dead goldfish, my body popped back to the right, jiggled a little bit, and then stopped.
Again, I fell back to the left.
Again, Yamauchi followed me.
Again, the bubble popped. I drifted back up. Drew Cosner cleared his throat. I shook my head, hard, for an instant and a half. Again with the "yabbadiabbityabbada" sound. I looked Yamauchi in the eye, and stated, in a kingly tone:
"ORE NO KOTO, GOOOOJASU TO OMOUsSU KA?"
Drew Cosner groaned. I hiccupped. My ear pulled me to the left. Yamauchi followed. The bubble popped. I was back up in a moment.
"You alright, man?" Yamauchi asked. He reached out and gave me his bottle of Evian. "Have a drink."
"Y-yeah. Yes. I think I'm alright."
He pointed at his ear. "You have an ear-infection?"
"Yeah. Yes, I do."
"You get them a lot?"
"More often than I'd like."
"Have you been on an airplane recently?"
"Yeah. You . . . get ear infections, yourself?"
"I used to get them in college. For no reason at all."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. Ear infections are usually an infant ailment. It's because babies have shorter ear canals, you see. Some adults have short ear canals, too. Like -- who was that one Western actor who never lost his baby teeth?"
"Lord -- I totally know who you're talking about. I don't remember his name, though."
"Well, yeah, it's like that guy. Tiny teeth. Some people have tiny ear canals."
"You know, you can see my eardrum with your naked eye."
"Oh yeah?"
He took a look.
"I don't see it."
"Maybe it's hiding."
"Heh."
I opened my mouth, licked my top lip, blinked. Where was I?
"So, yeah, you make videogames, eh?"
"That I do."
"When did you decide to get into games?"
"In college (studied business and physics) I started writing programs on graphing calculators. Well, before that, I did some Commodore 64 stuff."
"What kind of stuff?"
"I made games about moving objects, and accomplishing goals."
"Any inspirations?"
"Choplifter on the C64. Best game ever if you ask me. The intertia of the helicopter in the air was like magic. I felt more kinship with the inertia of the helicopter than I did with, say, Super Mario. Machines are more interesting in a videogame. I could imagine it was me in that cockpit, controlling that helicopter, rescuing those hostages."
"A-amazing."
This is, to me, like what an alcoholic commonly refers to as a "moment of clarity." A videogame producer just gave me the best introspective glance at his game-designer schtick that I think I've ever heard.
So Yamauchi goes on. In the early 1990s, he was experimenting with three-dimensional physics models in videogames. He used the PlayStation to do this. His first shot at a three-dimensional game that incorporated his scratch-built physics model was a racer called Motor Toon Grand Prix. That game incorporated an artist, as well, who created some disturbing attempts at "cute" "mascot" car characters. The game, by Yamauchi's garage programming studio Polyphony Digital, was produced in 1994 and published in 1995 by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan at the height of the original PlayStation's trial-by-fire in the Japanese market. It was fed to an eager public by a Sony eager to find a cute mascot. It sold well enough to warrant a sequel. The sequel sold well enough in Japan and Europe to score Yamauchi a producer's position at Sony Computer Entertainment.
"Every employee at Sony Computer Entertainment, back in those days, was required to fill out a suggestion card and drop it in a box, every day."
I recalled the opening pages of Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook, and scratched at my own right thigh, fearing radishes might be sprouting any minute now.
"The card asked for a lot of details. Basically, all employees were supposed to think of one game concept every day. You think of the concept, and fill in all the blanks. Recommended title, hook of the game, ideas for characters -- mascots, maybe -- how the control scheme might work, why the game would be new and original, all that. Every employee in game design had to do this once a day, six days a week, twenty-five days a month. Ken Kutaragi read all the suggestions himself. If he liked it, he'd call you up to his office."
"You -- you did this, too?"
Yamauchi held up one finger.
"Just once."
"Yeah? What'd you say?"
"I wrote 'I want to drive my own car on my television.'"
"And Kutaragi called you up?"
"Yes."
"And that's Gran Turismo?"
"Yep."
"Well."
"Well!"
Yamauchi uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
"So, uh," I start to ask, "at that time, when you said 'my car,' what kind of car were you talking about?"
Yamauchi snapped his fingers, and pointed at me. "That's a good question."
About a minute of grinning silence passed. I finished the Evian. Someone brought me another. Someone brought Yamauchi another Evian. We shared a moment of drinking Evian.
"I didn't have a car," he said at last. "Nope, didn't even have a driver's license. Isn't that nuts?"
"It is!"
"Yeah, well, I made a game about cars."
"So you -- like cars?"
"Oh hell yeah. They're great."
Yamauchi is a daily fitness runner. Thinking of his earlier words about Choplifter, I can imagine what he'd say if asked to give a capsule review of "cars in general": "cars have personality; they are running machines, machines that run for the hell of it. I like to imagine I'm inside the car while it's running."
I remember the eyes in the headlights of one of the cars in Motor Toon Grand Prix. I shudder.
I think of how none of the cars in Gran Turismo can ever be portrayed in damaged form. I want to get some quotes from Yamauchi on this. I know why it is -- all of the car companies see Gran Turismo as an advertising move. The dozens of car makers who hung up the phone on the younger Yamauchi when he asked to borrow a car so he could record its engine sound and drive it down a test course in adverse weather conditions had scoffed at the idea that putting their car in a videogame could profit them in any way. When Gran Turismo released and sold millions to non-gaming worldwide, pushing car magazines the world over to break their conventions and publish gushing reviews, the car companies called Yamauchi and begged. This resulted in Gran Turismo 2 having 600 cars whereas Gran Turismo only had 60. In Gran Turismo 3, Yamauchi had to start refusing car models.
"It was just too much work. It was great," he said.
***
Yamauchi will tell you, if you ask him, why Gran Turismo always sells. It's the same feeling as what Yuji Horii will tell you if you ask him why Dragon Quest always sells. It's because of quality. Yamauchi is so absolutely confident about every element of his game that he will never release a product that is less than packed with content.
I'd gotten confident talking with Yamauchi, so I asked him a few hard questions.
"You say this B-spec director's mode is for 'casual car fans,' and that the A-spec racing mode is for 'hardcore Gran Turismo fans.' Why not make a mode that's, you know, for casual game fans? Not everyone's a 'casual car fan' or a 'hardcore Gran Turismo fan.'"
Yamauchi smirked. Actually, it was the same smirk as from the beginning.
"Well, not everyone is a casual game fan, either."
He had me there.
"What about . . . you? Do you consider yourself a game fan?"
"Well -- yes, and no. Yes, because I still play videogames. No, because I don't play a lot of videogames."
"What games do you play?"
"Gran Turismo 3."
"You -- yeah? What kind of setup you got?"
"Huge damn TV, Logitec steering wheel, Dolby 5.1."
"How often do you play?" This question had my hands shaking. This was intriguing as hell.
Yamauchi shrugged. "Just about every day."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah, I do an endurance race."
In a Honda S-2000. On Tokyo Highway Route 246. Sixty laps. Every day.
"So I take it you're pretty good?"
"Yeah, I ain't bad. Not world-class material, though hey, I ain't bad."
"Heh."
"Heh."
Here, the interview digressed. I could hear my heart beating in my ear. It wasn't beating overly fiercely. It was just letting me know it was there. Who was interviewing whom at this point, no one was sure. The TBS cameraman had to keep asking his producer if he was supposed to keep filming. The PR people stood with clipboards clutched to their chests, pressing cellular phone earpieces into their ears, whispering spy messages into their codecs. The translator kept tittering at the conversation. I leaned to the left and popped back up about fifteen times, maybe. Well, I'm just making that number up, though hell, roll with it.
**
In late December, Sony and Polyphony Digital, in cooperation with a magazine publisher so major I don't know their name, put out a book of photos of Gran Turismo 4. That book contains, also, much technical information that is also printed in the 210-page Gran Turismo 4 Technical Manual, written by Kazunori Yamauchi himself. And, curiously, near the middle of the book, is a photo series of Kazunori Yamauchi and a young, tight-bodied girl whom profiles say is twenty-two years old. The photos are accompanied by five solid, magazine-sized pages of interview text in which it is literally impossible for any scholar to tell who is interviewing whom. I bought this magazine and pored over the interview for a few hours, seriously trying to pick it apart. It's billed as an "interview," though it really reads more like a conversation. There are questions, of course. The girl, apparently kind of famous to guys who read comic magazines that have girls in bikinis on the covers even in November, asks Yamauchi what his favorite car is, and he says the Honda S-2000. He then asks her how old she is. She says she's twenty-two. He says he was twenty-two when he first got the idea for Gran Turismo. She tells him he's an exceptional human being -- she of course knows that he is also the richest man in game design -- to be able to have his goal in mind at such an age. At twenty-two, mourns this girl, she has no clue where she will wind up. He tells her to be careful saying things like that. She'll be more than alright, says Yamauchi, if she just thinks squarely about who she is rather than who she's going to be. Live life like driving a car down a highway.
Interesting.
***
Spying my High-Lows wristband, Kazunori Yamauchi, a fan of the band, and of all old-timey rock and roll, begins asking me about music. He asks me if I'm in a band, and says I look like the kind of guy to be in a band. He asks me why I speak Japanese. I tell him it's kind of an interesting story. We talk about The Blue Hearts -- apparently, we've both met ex-bassist Junnosuke Kawaguchi under similar circumstances.
"You know," Yamauchi says, "I pick all the music in the Gran Turismo games myself."
The readers of this fine website might not know that the Japanese version of the game is mostly laced with hardcore punk-rock and acidy jazzy trip-hoppy techno, whereas the Western versions simply pull a few songs off the Billboard charts.
"Oh yeah?"
I find this more interesting than a mere "Oh yeah?" can indicate.
Yeah, he tells me. And sometimes, for fun, he helps Sony's in-house advertising agency by picking music for commercials. It's a great hobby. He recommends it if you ever, you know, get into a major position of power. The small things, you see.
He tells me they're doing a new commercial for the new thin PlayStation2 hardware, where they show the hardware on the left side of the screen and various objects on the right. He told me, "Pick eight seconds of a particular Blue Hearts song, and a small object to compare to the PlayStation2. Just, do it."
I shrugged. "'Kisu shite hoshii' ('I want you to kiss me') -- a good rhythm, doo-woppy backing vocals, just the intro part, from the guitar-reverb intro -- and . . . heh, a bottle of Tabasco sauce." I thought about some people who hate me and think mentioning Tabasco is funny.
"Done, and done."
***
Two weeks later, I saw the commercial. I was eating vegetarian kimchee udon with hot chunky tofu. I almost spit soup all over the table.
The realization lived in two words:
No. Shit.
***
After a half an hour, people are getting tired. My cellular phone is vibrating in my pocket. Brandon Sheffield is emailing me about Disneyland. He's waiting at the station for us. He's getting pissed. I'm wrapping up with Yamauchi. We're like brothers by now. I tell him a dark secret.
"I . . . I used to play Gran Turismo. It was Gran Turismo 2 that hooked me the fiercest. I remember playing it in a house in Bloomington, Indiana, my god, far, far away from here, when I was in my last year in college. My god, Gran Turismo and a Dual Shock controller were the only two things I ever received for a birthday present in my entire life. I -- there was a girl I liked. I got the game on my birthday. I took her to a movie. I ended up having to pay. And I took her home. And my friend -- this great guy who was gay, and he thought I was, too, even though I didn't know he . . . was -- he gave me GT and the Dual Shock, and he had his own Dual Shock, and we played the ever-loving bejesus out of the game at his house. Two years later, it was GT2, and I was living with that guy, and my girlfriend. The GT2 was his. I played it all alone. Eventually, GT3 came out, and I had that, too.
"In GT1, I loved my 1994 Mitsubishi GTO Twin Turbo. In GT2, it was my custom 1994 Toyota Supra all the way. In GT3, I could not part with my 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX STi. In fact -- in fact -- I am convinced that the WRX is the car for me, based on GT3--"
"Get that ear infection fixed, and you can come down to The Ranch and test-drive one."
"Sure--sure."
I swallow.
"I -- I played the games a lot. A whole lot. It's like, I didn't even remember playing them until you mentioned how you play a race every night. I remember, now. My friends loved Gran Turismo in the beginning, though soon -- soon it just got old, for them. I kept playing. I haven't seen enough of 4 to know if, you know, you're advancing the formula much more. I'm sure you know what's wrong with the games, you know, like how there are only five rivals in circuit races, all those technical things like that. I understand that you're trying to create the perfect simulator of driving grand touring cars, and that's great. That's wholly great stuff. I just -- I wonder. My friends used to always say, when they saw me playing Gran Turismo 2 -- they couldn't see the time I'd invested just to learn how to drift -- 'this game again? this is boring! put in Crazy Taxi!' And I think, there are a lot of games like that. Crazy Taxi. OutRun2. Oh my lord, Burnout, have you played that?"
Yamauchi smirked. "Yeah. It's nice."
"Just -- do you ever think you might make a game like that?"
Yamauchi did not hesitate:
"Never."
My ear popped very hard.
I emailed him that night, deep into the night, asking if he'd consider putting a song by my band, Large Prime Numbers, a song called "MOENAI GOMI ~the unburnable garbage~", into the PSP version of Gran Turismo 4.
His reply came in ten minutes. "If it doesn't suck, by all means yes."
His replies tend to always come within an hour.
***
Today, December 29th, 2004, the doorbell rang, and it was Sony's private courier service with Gran Turismo 4, signed by Kazunori Yamauchi:
"Dear Tim: it's supposed to snow on New Year's Eve. Do stay in, or else wear a hat. -- Kazu."
In closing -- Burnout 3 makes my list for games of 2004.
[next: october]
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