Whatever flavour of console is your favorite, if you like racing games you owe a debt of gratitude to Polyphony’s Gran Turismo.

The legendary sim-racing franchise is poised to celebrate its 25th birthday in 2022 with the hotly anticipated, and much delayed, Gran Turismo 7.

Gran Turismo helped make the original Playstation PS1 console a monster hit, and went on to inspire a legion of copycat games. But as Donut Media explains in its inimitable, screwy way, Sony’s execs were initially reluctant to give the game the green light.

When the GT franchise’s creator, Kazunori Yamauchi, proposed a realistic racing game to Sony’s high-ups, they thought it sounded too boring and tuned him down. Instead, they tasked him with making a rip-off of Nintendo’s phenomenally successful Mario Kart.

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So that’s what Yamauchi and his team did. But while Motor Toon Grand Prix looked very inch a Mario clone, it featured the realistic handling physics that would make the future Gran Turismo a hit. And when Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 was released in 1996 successful drivers could even unlock modes that swapped the cartoon cars for real road cars or open-wheel racers.

When Gran Turismo did eventually launch on the PS1 in 1997 it was so ridiculously successful that it made the Sony bosses who’d turned it down years earlier look like the guy from Decca who turned down the Beatles. Gran Turismo sold 11 million copies and became the top-selling PS1 title.

It also spawned a legion of imitators, including Forza on the Xbox, while successors to the original GT game proved even bigger hits than the original. Gran Turismo 3, the first version to make use of Sony’s PS2 in the early 2000s shifted a massive 15 million copies.

And judging from the online buzz that’s greeted the trailer videos for Gran Turismo 7, there’s still plenty of love for the GT franchise 24 years on from the original. Though initially slated for a 2021 release, GT7’s launch was pushed back due to the pandemic. It’s now expected to launch in March 2022 on both PS4 and PS5.