‘My First Gran Turismo’ Free Demo Will Be a Love Letter to GT’s Past

The original PlayStation launched on December 3, 1994 in Japan. That means we’re months away from the 30th anniversary of Sony’s wildly successful foray into the gaming business. Perhaps to celebrate its role in making PlayStation the household name it’s become, Gran Turismo developer Polyphony Digital is preparing a “free trial version” of Gran Turismo 7 that will harken back to “the very first GT experience.” Appropriately, it’ll be called My First GT.

Details of the upcoming release are slim at the moment, but Sony announced the title in a blog post showcasing some of the ways it’s celebrating three decades of PlayStation. Here’s what was shared:

So here’s what we know: It’s free; it’s “designed to attract players” to GT7, like a demo; its content will be inspired by the first game’s; and it’s releasing on both PS4 and PS5. There’s a slight dichotomy between “My First GT” and the copy, which makes it clear that they’re specifically talking about GT1.

Gran Turismo 7 already packs plenty of content referencing GT1, from tracks like High Speed Ring, Trial Mountain, Deep Forest, and Grand Valley; to cars like the Castrol Tom’s Supra, Dodge Viper GTS, Subaru Impreza Rally Car, and countless ’90s JDM icons. Should Polyphony want to venture into the franchise’s PS2 heyday—which would be cool—there’s also Laguna Seca and the Mazda 787B to consider. At any rate, we can easily predict the sort of car/track combos this release will be looking to recreate.

Personally, I’m hoping the demo will showcase the music and graphic design of that first title—black backgrounds, yellow buttons, and plenty of Isamu Ohira jazz. (The option to choose Jason Page’s western soundtrack would be the ultimate nostalgia play, but that’s never happening.) We can only wait and see how Polyphony attempts to tap into the vibe. The oldest-school GT fans will recall creator Kazunori Yamauchi’s desire to create a “Gran Turismo for Boys” targeting a younger audience and, in one sense, the title My First GT almost sounds like the final form of that idea.

Shoot me, but “Moon Over the Castle” has nothing on the Manic Street Preachers remix featured in the intro of GT1’s U.S. release.

Oh, and one more thing: A cut-down, free version of GT7 would present the perfect opportunity for Kaz and co. to introduce Gran Turismo to a PC audience. This was the tack Turn 10 Studios actually took with Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, an abbreviated PC port of FM6 that predated FM7’s full arrival on Windows. The big Nvidia leak of late 2021 colloquially known as “Jensen’s Prophecy” indicated a GT7 PC port was in the works, and Yamauchi himself hasn’t exactly shot down the idea since.

Alas, Sony’s message here couldn’t be clearer: This is a PS4- and PS5-only affair. Perhaps that’s fitting, given that this is PlayStation’s big 3-0, after all. I’ve put more than 500 hours into GT7 since it launched two and a half years ago, and I’m still excited to see how My First GT pays tribute to The Real Driving Simulator’s influential past.

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