Every fan of racing games should be familiar with the Gran Turismo series. However, not everyone knows the probably funniest and at the same time most absurd bug in one part of the series.
What kind of game is this? Gran Turismo is a racing game series, with the first installment released in Japan in 1997. Over the years, countless spin-offs of the series have been published, the latest being Gran Turismo 7 in 2022.
In an older part of the series, Gran Turismo 3, which was released in 2001 on the PlayStation 2, there was an extremely curious bug. This bug made it possible for you to go faster than any known vehicle in the history of mankind.
You can see the trailer for a competitor in the racing game genre here:
NASA would be jealous
What kind of bug is this? Through a specific combination of various settings and maneuvers, it was possible to achieve an absurd speed with the Suzuki Escudo, causing problems for the game.
This bug, also known as the “wheelie glitch,” was triggered when the front wheels of the vehicle left the ground. Specific settings in aerodynamics and the vehicle’s suspension had to be adjusted for this to happen.
This could result in your vehicle traveling at an incredible speed of 2,147,483,647 mph – which translates to over 3.4 billion km/h. The game could not handle this speed correctly, leading to issues in the visual representation of the car.
You can check out what that looked like in this video:
What does the number mean? In software development, there are so-called variables. These are containers where data can be stored. The number 2,147,483,647 is the maximum number that can be stored in a certain variable type.
The bug in the game caused the speed to increase until the maximum value that was available for speed in the game was reached.
Not only bugs can lead to curiosities in racing games. Last year there was a scandal where a popular racing game was removed by its publisher – from the libraries of the players who had paid for it: Ubisoft deletes a game from the libraries of players – Reminds us that we own nothing.
