We tend to associate video game intros with elaborate, pre-rendered cinematics. Something that helps start the story sets the tone. Which is fine, but a video game intro has been on my mind for over a decadeand it didn’t try to tell me a story. It was trying to teach me something.
Gran Turismo 5 Released on PS3 in 2010, at a time when people still cared about it Great tourism. As such, this was a large Game, and it comes with a suitably large, expensive intro sequence. An intro that turned out you know what? Each car game uses its opening to only show cars that are driving fast. Let’s do something otherwise.
And so GT5 did not open with a racetrack. It started with a lesson on where cars come from.
Isn’t that wild? I started this game to race, not learn, and yet the education I received in the first two minutes of this video stuck with me for years longer than any other GT5s sanitized racing ever made it.
It is one thing to know rough How automobiles are made – we’ve all seen chassis roll down on factory floors – but seeing the entire journey of a vehicle from raw material to finished product achieved what I suspect was Polyphony’s intent with the video : I have come to appreciate every single car a lot more.
Even putting the game aside, it was cool to just learn this and see it all in action. Gain an understanding not only of each car in the game, but also of how my own car was dug out of the ground in the real world back then [skip some steps] put together.
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Oh, and yes, the snappy piano work is good too.
There’s a good lesson here, video game developers. If you’re ever fixated on an intro sequence, don’t rely on the traditional. If you can’t tell a story or set one up, we can always learn a thing or two.
This story was originally published in 2018
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