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Sony is announcing today that the Gran Turismo Academy competition, unveiled during PlayStation Day, will be opening soon as well as detailing exactly what will take place over the coming months.
The official website is now open for all prospective competitors to check out and registration will be taking place soon. The competition is open to residents of the UK & Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Germany & Austria, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark and the first phase, which begins on June 2nd, will last for seven weeks.
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Heritage is measured by an aggregate of impeccable work, outstanding performance, unparalleled design and revolutionary thinking. It’s a quality that few command, and those that do are respected for where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’ll go in the years to come. Ferrari has it, as do BMW, Ford, and Nissan to name a few. It represents years of passion and dedication, the power to reach beyond the niche and simultaneously dwarf and inspire the competition.

This is heritage, this is Gran Turismo. This is our decade long devotion to excellence, as this week marks our 10 year anniversary of the Gran Turismo series in North America.

And as of April 30, Gran Turismo has shipped over 50 million games worldwide, complete with unrivaled physics, stunning graphics and a loyal fan base from every industry and lifestyle across the globe.

Many of you who have been fans of the series can fondly look back with us to the days of the first Gran Turismo on PSone, which in many ways revolutionized and redefined the racing category within video games. Licensed cars, realistic graphics, customization, replays were all pretty much unheard of, or unimagined, back then in racing games. Since then, Gran Turismo has grown and evolved, adding new features as the series progressed. It has also allowed millions the chance to test drive EVOs, STIs and GT-Rs, cars that were extremely rare in North America. Many also extended their passion from virtual to actual, actively seeking those rare imports, working on them and tuning them for track racing. The series also introduced Photo Mode, a simple and overlooked feature that is now a standard in any racing game, as well as B-spec mode, where you became the race team manager, commanding from the paddock.

Which leads us to the here and now with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue on the PLAYSTATION 3, a thorough racing experience with multiple views and features that will once again, change the way racing games are experienced. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue offers Gran Turismo-TV, automotive content from around the world, news feeds ticker off real-time events, and sixteen player games (both online and offline) that recreate the rush of actual track racing.

This is where our passions lie–in the cars, driving, and racing heritage. We’ve come a long way from the days of the first Gran Turismo, and we still have a ways to go to complete the vision.

Happy 10th Anniversary to everyone at Polyphony Digital and all the fans, both new and old, in our global Gran Turismo family.

PS3’s ultimate tech demo proves beauty is in the eye of the key-holder.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue might only be a demo, but it’s worth £25 alone to justify the £1000 you splurged on a PS3 and a 1080p HDTV. Prologue - the preview version of 2009’s full-on GT5 - looks even better than the stills on these pages. It’s the game you’ll use to convince confused loved ones about the power of PS3.

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“Simply astounding,” says Producer Kazunori Yamauchi.

Sony says that its Gran Turismo racing series has notched up 50 million sales across all PlayStation formats (except PSP though) in ten years and precisely four months.

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