Kazunori Yamauchi: "Game 3.0 is just propaganda" (and Blu-Ray is irrelevant)
Italy's second best-selling newspaper, La Repubblica, has published a very interesting interview to Kazunori Yamauchi, the mind behind the Gran Turismo series. Yamauchi is currently touring Europe to promote his latest glorified demo, GT5 Prologue (best-selling game in all European countries - if you needed a further proof that the PS3 is going to smash the Xbox 360 before you say "apple pie" in the Old Continent, there you have it: Europeans would buy anything that has a "Sony" logo stamped on it).
Yamauchi comments quite candidly on Harrison's most famous slogan - Game 3.0 - saying that is just "propaganda" and that "it means nothing". Before you shout "Heresy!", please note that a) Jaime D'Alessandro, the journalist who talked to Yamauchi, is extremely competent and reliable and b) La Repubblica is an authoritative paper - even for a country with relatively low standards like the Land of Persimmons.
Here's an excerpt:
La Repubblica: At the Tokyo Game Show 2006, [Phil Harrison] mentioned that they wanted to bring the Web 2.0 philosophy to console games and to encourage user-generated content. Harrison, last year, went even further, suggesting that we entered the era of Game 3.0, an age where gamers and their creativity are at the center.
Yamauchi: "Talking about Web 2.0 in Japan was very en vogue two or three yaesr ago. Today this notion is dead, at least in Japan."La Repubblica: Really?
Yamauchi: "Yeah. And the idea of Game 3.0 is just propaganda."
More interesting tidbits:
1) Yamauchi on videogames: "I don't play many videogames. Only Gran Turismo."
2. Yamauchi on the format war: "The future is digital download and digital delivery. As the penetration of broadband increases, formats like CD, DVD and Blu-Ray will eventually disappear."
3) Yamauchi on film and videogames" Videogames are at least 10 years behind animation (movies) in terms of aesthetics. And that gap will not change in the foreseeable future".
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