I Dropped $50 on This Rare Gran Turismo Demo and I Regret Nothing

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15 hours ago

If you're reading this website, you're probably nerdy about something—and I'm willing to bet it's not just cars. Maybe that leads you to hoarding memorabilia or working far too long on a project, never content to put the tools down. Oftentimes, such passions manifest in questionable financial decisions. I made one such purchase last weekend, when I dropped $50 on an old Gran Turismo demo disc with one car and one track, in a race the game won't even let you finish.
Why would I do this? The disc I purchased at a gaming convention last weekend is called Gran Turismo 2000, and it was kind of a mystical thing back in my youth. After Gran Turismo 2 on the original PlayStation, developer Polyphony Digital naturally set its sights on bringing the smash-hit franchise to Sony's next-generation console. Its initial efforts materialized in builds of a project called GT2000, which first appeared at the Tokyo Game Show in late 1999, ahead of the PlayStation 2's Japanese launch the following March.
GT2000 was shown a few more times at events over the next year: Once at Sony's PlayStation Festival 2000 in Chiba, Japan, in mid-February, and then months later at trade shows in the U.S. and U.K. as well. Those PlayStation Festival attendees, however, received GT2000 demo discs they could load into the PS2s they'd soon have, and this iteration of the game is the only one that has ever made its way into the public's hands. That's what I bought.
Whether Gran Turismo 2000 was intended to be the third GT's title is unclear, but once the game slipped into 2001, Polyphony naturally chose a new name: Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec. GT3 went on to be a juggernaut, understood to be the second-best-selling PS2 game ever, at least as of the last time anyone bothered to count. But GT2000 is almost nothing like it, even though it was compiled just 14 months before the final game hit stores in Japan.
See, this is why I couldn't pass up an opportunity to own a copy of GT2000. With demo discs of yore, you'd typically get a slice of the full game; depending on when the demo was minted, it might even look or play a little differently from the finished article. But, to anyone who knows Gran Turismo, GT2000 barely feels like an early, work-in-progress snapshot of GT3. In fact, it feels more like GT2—and that's what makes it so special.
In GT2000, you drive the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution V around the Seattle Circuit, a track that first appeared in GT2. There are five opponents: a Honda NSX, FD Mazda RX-7, R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R, Subaru Legacy B4, and Toyota Altezza, always in the same colors. The race isn't limited to laps, but rather a 120-second timer that is just about long enough to pass the finish line once. Then you get a replay, and then you're rudely punted back to the title screen. One song plays as you drive— 'Mirage' by Daiki Kasho—and it's kind of infamous for being obnoxious, but I love it.
The car select menu (it's honestly more of a color and transmission select menu, because you can't choose another car) spits you out into a race with no countdown—just a rolling start where you immediately have control over your Evo. The first thing you notice is that the vehicle physics are pretty much a match for GT2's. The Lancer feels extremely light and tossable, and you can fling it into corners and pull off some effortless drifts that would require a bit more finesse with GT3's weightier, more nuanced handling model. GT3 drives well, of course, and certainly more realistically, but GT2's liveliness appeals to the arcade racing lover in me, and I have a lot more fun throwing around the Evo here than I do in the final game.
This demo is rough, though. For one, walls don't slow you down much at all. If you turn around at the start and drive through a tire barrier, you can easily break out of the course's bounds. Computer-controlled opponents exit most corners wide and strike the guardrails. And the graphics are hardly stellar. Aside from the physics, this is the other big difference between GT2000 and GT3. The car models resemble GT2 assets with slightly more intricate geometry; their windows are still opaque black, just like on the PS1, while they'd be transparent in time for GT3's release.
The Seattle Circuit itself also looks rather flat and simplistic, with lower-resolution textures throughout. Comparing key sections of the track across both games, you can see how Polyphony built far more detail into the environment and trackside scenery in little more than a year. The overpass that the circuit runs beneath after Turn 1, for example, is mostly flat in GT2000. In GT3, we see beams and cables in shadows.
Further into the lap in GT2000, we pass Seattle's since-demolished Kingdome. In GT3, the Kingdome is still present, but resides next to Safeco Field, known as T-Mobile Park today. The Mariners' new home wasn't finished in time for the environment modelers to get it into GT2, so it's a nice touch that they were able to go back and include it in GT3.
Indeed, GT3 is an objectively better experience, and history has proven that few developers were able to harness the PS2's power as well as Polyphony. And yet, there's something fascinating about seeing what is effectively GT2 running on more powerful hardware at double the framerate and a higher (albeit interlaced) resolution. For all its faults, it almost feels like a GT2 'Plus.'
Audiences around the time of the demo's release were stunned by the heat haze effect Polyphony was able to convey in replays. It seems quaint now, but Gran Turismo was on the cutting edge of real-time graphics even then. Little details, like how GT2000's cars accurately reflect the environment they're in, rather than the vague, scrolling light effects you'd see in the PS1 games, represent serious steps forward. And all of it would be further refined for GT3.
GT2000, then, is a fascinating snapshot of Gran Turismo at a precise moment in time, to a nerd like me. And, as Digital Foundry's John Linneman pointed out in his fantastic retrospective on the series that you ought to watch if you care about stuff like this, what makes GT2000 all the more special is how Polyphony improved upon it so profoundly in GT3. These days, it's sadly not uncommon for our first glimpse at a game to be markedly more impressive than the final shipping product, but Gran Turismo bucked that expectation in a big way.
Personally, snagging a copy of this demo represents something else, for me: closure. I remember gaming magazines talking it up when I was a kid, and when GT3 eventually emerged, I wondered what happened to GT2000. Of course, it was never a secret—the final game literally missed the year 2000, and this disc was never released outside Japan—but these kinds of things carry a lot of weight when you're young.
And I'm happy to say that there's been a positive development in my securing a copy of GT2000. Remember how I said that you could only drive the Evo in this game? I shared my purchase with members of the racing-game-centric Discord community I run. One of them goes by the name of Silent—he's the developer perhaps best known for fixing old Grand Theft Auto games so they run better than ever on PC. Silent built upon work done by another Gran Turismo modder years back, named Xenn, and is whipping up cheats that can be used in the PCSX2 emulator to remove GT2000's two-minute time limit and let the player drive any of the game's six cars. Neat stuff!
It's unclear how many GT2000 discs Sony pressed for that Festival show, whether in the hundreds or the thousands. Either way, they're not impossible to find, and if I really wanted to, I could've scoured eBay for a copy years ago. Yeah, $50 is a lot, but you might be surprised to learn that it's a pittance compared to what some truly rare or high-demand games command nowadays. I could never bring myself to shell out the cash until the chance presented itself in person. Now that I have, surprise, surprise: I regret nothing.
Got any memorabilia you love yet spent a stupid amount of money on? Email me at [e-mail]