It is every racing gamer's dream: to take the sublime skills and expertise honed for countless hours on a simulator and turn it into a racetrack career.
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Japanese car giant Nissan has been ahead of this game, so to speak, for years and in cinema shortly a new release traces the true journey from the basement to the racetrack for one young Brit, Jann Mardenborough. With a little Hollywood licence thrown in for good measure, of course.
For car racing gamers, Gran Turismo has been the cult hero and standard bearer for years, and was one of the original Sony Playstation console sims.
Work began on the video game/simulator in 1992, the creators taking years to model it as closely as possible on the genuine steering and handling responses of the selected cars, complete with the sound recordings of the real-life vehicles.
While Nissan has struggled for years to get mainstream coverage of its Nismo GT Academy partnership pathway linked with Gran Turismo, this new movie release - with District 9 director Neill Blomkamp throwing in visual action and drama by the high-octane tankful - should correct that quite easily.
The GT academy concept is that the fastest gamers compete online to progress through to driving something real: the "gamer to racer" progression that took Mardenborough off the couch and into the cockpit.
He beat 90,000 other gamers to win the 2011 European GT Academy series, went on to race impressively against others on a racetrack, and has now (in real life) progressed to the fiercely competitive Japanese Super GT series, with the heady world of Formula One his end goal.
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Sony Pictures and Nissan have, of course, kicked the tin in a significant fiscal way for this release which arrives here in August, a few months after the latest of the Fast and Furious franchise car-burners torched its way onto the big screen.
Blomkamp is the ideal choice to direct this every-teen's-dream action biopic. He's a car nut from way back, buying his first BMW M3 with the first big cheque from his early days in making commercials.
He has owned three of Nissan's premium all-wheel drive GT-R sports coupes and naturally enough, that car features very heavily in the new film.
If it all sounds like an extended version of an advertisement for Sony and Nissan, that's probably close to the truth but it's certain to be a hit among a certain age-group, and help justify many more hundreds of hours of broadband-guzzling, screen-focussed intensity in darkened rooms all over the country.
Young British actor Archie Madekwe plays Mardenborough, former Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell his mother and Hollywood A-lister Orlando Bloom provides the star power. Appropriately, the public debut of Gran Turismo was on the same weekend at the Monaco Grand Prix.
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