Forza: Everything you Need to Know | Up to Speed

**The World of Digital Racing: Forza and Its Impact on Gaming**

Before we dive into the story, if you can do me a favor and hit that like button, it really, really does help a lot in the algorithm. And the algorithm is technically a robot that controls part of my life. So I wanna get some of the control back.

Let's talk about Forza. It's the game that literally opened up the world of digital racing. The first console racer that let you yell at other people online and the only racing game to knock the mighty Grand Turismo from its golden throne. This is everything you need to know to get up to speed on Forza.

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**The Rise of the PlayStation and Grand Turismo**

The Sony PlayStation turned the video game world upside down when it came out in 1994. The graphics were next level. You could play fricking CDs with it. And most importantly, it boasted a huge number of popular games. The most popular game was a little piece of gaming history that I like to call Grand Turismo.

Grand Turismo was the revolutionary brainchild of Japanese programmer and car enthusiast Kazunori Yamauchi. Before the OG grand Turismo game came out in 1997, racing games were either boring sims that took themselves way too seriously or cartoony Mario cart-type chaos. Grand Turismo's advanced physics engine, cutting-edge graphics, and a huge selection of real-life cars changed everything.

It was a smash hit with gamers and car nerds alike. A lot of people in our generation got into cars because of Grand Turismo. Kazunori Yamauchi was a car nut, and it showed. The first game in the series featured a ridiculous 178 playable vehicles. Everything from Dodge Vipers to Mazda Demios, and all those cars handled like their real-life counterparts.

Kaz and his team spent years gathering data to make the game as realistic as possible. Then, they spent years dialing it back a little bit to make sure that the game was still fun to play. Now we did an episode on Grand Turismo, and in my might sound like we're doing another one, but we're not. I'm going to talk about Forza soon. And if you wanna know more about that, I'm gonna put the link to that video in the description.

Anyway, the first Grand Turismo was the best-selling game on the PS one. Which helped Sony move a record-breaking 100 million consoles, which helped them develop something that would turn the console gaming world upside down, even harder.

**The Birth of the PlayStation 2**

To top the first PlayStation, Sony had a little trick up its sleeve. The sequel would be a media system that could play DVDs! The company even envisioned it as competition for the personal computer, which spooked little Bill Gates down Microsoft way. He worried that a system like the PS two could eventually put Microsoft out of business.

Gates first tried to partner with Sony to develop the PS two software platform. But Sony was like...