Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec turns 25 years old today. First released in Japan on April 28, 2001, the PlayStation 2’s debut Gran Turismo title remains one of the best-selling games in the franchise’s history, and arguably one of the most important. It’s the game that took Gran Turismo from “huge PlayStation success story” to global phenomenon. The numbers tell that part of the story plainly enough: just under 15 million copies sold worldwide, with 7.1 million in the US alone. GT3 held the title of best-selling Gran Turismo for over two decades, and was a major contributor to the franchise’s recently-passed 100 million career sales milestone. But sales alone don’t explain why so many people still frequently rank it as the best Gran Turismo a quarter of a century later. Gran Turismo 2000 Gran Turismo 3 began life as “Gran Turismo 2000“, a PlayStation 2 launch-title project that was shown at E3 2000 under that working title, and a public demo disc version appeared in Japan at PlayStation Festival that year. The 2000 launch slipped, the title changed, and what eventually shipped on April 28, 2001 was a different beast entirely. GT3 was a smaller game than Gran Turismo 2, in the most literal sense. GT2 had carried more than 600 cars; GT3 shipped with under 200. GT3’s car roster was smaller because the series moved from PS1 to PS2 and used far more detailed car models. As a result, many GT2-era cars and niche marques did not carry over to GT3, and some never returned. In exchange, players got the largest visual leap in the series’ history. Gran Turismo 3 used the PS2’s Emotion Engine to deliver much more detailed cars, real-time reflections, richer environmental effects, and replays that looked strikingly like a TV broadcast. The Firsts Even with