Originally appeared on Automoblog.net
The year was 1998. I’m a freshman in high school and whole-heartedly addicted to Final Fantasy VII for the original Sony Playstation. After far too many weeks of playing after school nearly every day and my counter stuck at 99 hours of gameplay for, well, probably more than 99 additional hours, I beat the final boss, Sephiroth. It was no easy task.
But now what" I’ve played through all my other games, and Final Fantasy VIII wasn’t coming out for almost another year!
My friend recommended a new game called Gran Turismo – a racing simulator he said has “crazy awesome graphics”. I’d never been interested in racing games, save for Out Run and Cruis’n USA at the arcade, but I borrowed his copy and gave it a shot. I understood that the cars in there were all real, but it made no difference to me – they all looked the same anyway. A few days later I bought my own copy. I was sure I wasn’t addicted, until I woke up one morning with the controller still in hand, my car (a Mitsubishi FTO if I remember correctly) sitting there, face-first against the wall – race timer still counting, six and a half hours later.
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A few months later, I could name many of the cars on the (real) road. At least ...