SCEE has revealed that over 830,000 gamers entered the Nissan and PlayStation GT Academy Online Competition across Europe. The entry for the competition closed last week, which involved gamers download and competing in a Gran Turismo 5 standalone demo.
The first stage of this year’s driver search – the online qualification round – is now in full swing. If you remember from last year, GT Academy is a virtual competition to find a real-life racing driver, run by Sony and Nissan.
PlayStation and Polyphony Digital have teamed up once again with Nissan North America to bring you GT Academy, a competition using Gran Turismo 5 to win the ultimate prize – a chance to become a professional race car driver, starting December 20.
Sony Europe has confirmed that the Gran Turismo 5′s Time Trial demo has been downloaded over 1 million times since it was released last month. The demo was release on December 17th 2009 in order to find contestants for this years GT Academy and as a preview of the highly anticipated game. According to the press release, reaching the one million download milestone hails “early success of virtual-to-real-racer experiment.”
The GT Academy 2010 competition enters the third week of the online time trial competition, with a huge number of gamers vying for a place in the Top 20 in their country and a seat at the national final. With this in mind, the winner of GT Academy 2009, Lucas Ordonez, has released a inspirational video on how he went from Gran Turismo player to real-life racer.
The GT Academy 2010 kicks off this week with the release of the Gran Turismo 5 Time Trial. After the success of GT Academy 2009, Nissan and PlayStation decided to team up again for GT Academy 2010, in the hopes of finding real racing talent from Gran Turismo fans. The online section of the game will run from 17 December until 24 January with national finals following soon afterwards. The GT Academy itself takes place from 26 February until 3 March.
On the December 17th 2009, European PS3 owners will be able to download a special version of Gran Turismo 5, entitled the GT Academy 2010 Time Trial. The Time Trial is also one of the prerequisites to taking part in the 2010 GT Academy. Qualify in the top twenty within your country and you will be invited to a national final event, where you will pit your wits against the best Gran Turismo drivers in the country.
