Gran Turismo 4 Mobile to be PS2 port

TOKYO--Gran Turismo 4 Mobile for the PSP will essentially be a port of the PlayStation 2 Gran Turismo 4, said series producer Kazunori Yamauchi in an interview featured on Sony's official Japanese PlayStation Web site. In the interview, Yamauchi states that he plans to keep the same amount of content in the PSP version, but the developers at Polyphony Digital are determining what needs to be done to the PS2 version to make it playable on the handheld.

"The PSP is a portable game machine, and people may think it's oriented towards playing simple games, but it really has the same hardware performance as the PS2," comments Yamauchi in the interview. "Since we're already developing the GT4's system on the PS2 hardware, we're planning to port that directly to the PSP."

Yamauchi broadened the discussion to PSP games in general. "There's basically two ways of making games for the PSP. One way is to develop an original new game, which in general will be limited in its content since the price of PSP games aren't going to be too high, meaning the game's development budget will also be limited. We're going to be taking the second method, which is to take a system from a major title, and effectively sliding it onto the PSP hardware," he said.

Yamauchi also said that Gran Turismo 4 for the PS2 is currently still around 75 percent complete and that he plans to release it by the end of the year. Given that fact, it is unlikely that the PSP version will be finished in time for the PSP launch in Japan this fall and in the US in early 2005.