1UP: Since Sony has restructured its various divisions, your job has changed. How does your day to day job differ from what it used to be when you were just in charge of Polyphony?

Kazunori Yamauchi: The change may not be huge, but there is in fact a change to my day to day activities. Previously, I was 100% in charge of Polyphony and that was all I had to worry about, but currently maybe 30% of my day to day activities represent SCE corporate or overall PlayStation business planning or strategies -- things like that.

1UP: How would you compare your role on Tourist Trophy to your role on Gran Turismo 4?

KY: On GT4, I was pretty much all hands on, all the way down to every little detail including fixing the fraction times for license tests, to the furthest digit for the license times, making those adjustments, finding the right game balance. In terms of Tourist Trophy, we do have a director in-house who looked after this title, [Takamasa] Shichisawa a.k.a. Nana. He was looking after most of the overall gameplay. I supported Tourist Trophy with the technical portion and of course from the management level.

1UP: Shichisawa is a big motorcycle rider in real life. Do you ride motorcycles?

KY: I do not have experience riding, no.

1UP: Do you have a personal favorite bike in the game?

KY: It would have to be the CBR 600 that’s featured on the cover. [Note: In the photograph used for Tourist Trophy’s box art, the rider of the motorcycle is actually Shichisawa, the director of the game.]

KY: The most proud area is that we were able to be the first game that features real physics and performance simulation of bikes in a videogame. An area that we had hoped to fix but couldn’t would be displaying more bikes on the screen for a race -- that would obviously lead to a more exciting race, but this has been a limitation we’ve faced with the hardware performance unfortunately.

1UP: You mentioned the realism of the game. Is that what in your mind separates Tourist Trophy from the Moto GP games?

KY: Yeah, absolutely.

1UP: Which of the two, the Namco or the THQ Moto GP games, do you prefer?

KY: If I had to pick, it would be the one from THQ.

1UP: I know some of the same art assets were used in Tourist Trophy from Gran Turismo. From here do you see it becoming its own franchise, or is this more an experiment to see how it goes and then you’ll decide at that point?

KY: Back at the studio, Polyphony, we do have test machines where we can display both cars and bikes on the same tracks, just for experiment purposes. Perhaps maybe in the future we might have a title where we have both. This time around, the reason why they’ve been separated is only a technical reason, with these performance limitations with the PlayStation 2.

1UP: Finally, can you give us any update on Gran Turismo PSP?

KY: We are in the works. It is going forward. It does exist. We’re working on it. We don’t have a release date, of course. A question for you is do people out there really have high hopes for a GT version on PSP?

1UP: I think so, yeah. Back when it was first talked about, people got really excited. I guess it’s kind of fallen off the map because it hasn’t really been talked about since then, but it’ll be big news.

KY: Another question. Which do you think would you or the users would like to have first: a PS3 version of Gran Turismo or PSP version of Gran Turismo?

1UP: I guess the PS3...but what you could do is have the PSP version around August and then hit the PS3 launch in November...

KY: [laughs]