I Recreated Gran Turismo Photos in Real Life and Can’t Tell the Difference

Video games as a vector for car enthusiasm is one of the greatest things to happen to our collective passion since the first bedroom posters of the Lamborghini Countach. There have been many challengers: Forza, Test Drive, Driver, Need for Speed. But none have done it better than the best to ever do it: Gran Turismo. But that’s just it—it’s virtual. And I’ve always wanted to bridge that gap between virtual and material, to bring the game to life. I think I figured out how.

Gran Turismo 7 features a photo mode called Scapes, where a real photo of a location is turned into a semi-3D environment where you can place any of the nearly 500 cars on offer. You can settle a Bugatti Chiron into an impossibly quiet night scene in downtown Tokyo, hard park a heavily modified Nissan Silvia S15 in Normandy, or even glide around Los Angeles in a bright yellow Lexus LC 500 (hint, hint). There are 3,000 Scapes, meaning there are 3,000 places in the real world captured and immortalized by the game. Places anyone can visit—should they be able to find them.

Technically, it’s a good test of GT7’s graphics—if I could match a photo exactly, would you be able to tell which was real? But the goal was closer to spiritual than factual: I wanted to connect the dots between how we experience cars in real life and how something like GT7 captures the majesty of the automobile in a fantasy.

And there is just one car, for me at least, that always takes my breath away whenever I witness one. The choice was easy: I grabbed a Lexus LC 500 to bring two stunning, detail-crazed examples of excellence together. With this beautiful Flare Yellow example a worthy subject, I set out to find and carefully remaster the Scapes.

Finding the Fantasies

Developer Polyphony Digital doesn’t share specific location data for most Scapes, which range from obvious landmarks to random beauty shots around the world. Instead, you get a vague description, maybe a street name, but no coordinates or a pin on a map.

In the absence of a real map, the community has stepped up to crowdsource some location data, but I still had to do research to find each Scape, especially in a huge, dense urban area like Los Angeles. Some were obvious with local knowledge or a cursory Google search, others not at all. I also quickly ran into two issues: some of the best ones would result in me getting a huge ticket, and others no longer existed as they did when Polyphony captured them. Some were active street scenes where capturing the best photo would be challenging, to say the least.

Then there was the trouble of pinpointing the locations of the ones I didn’t know. It would take a certain amount of geographical knowledge, some skills with a map, and even a virtual reality headset to find some spots. Before I procured the LC 500, I scouted locations with other cars and took sample shots to note lighting, the position of the sun, and possible changes in landscape.

There are many more Scapes in Los Angeles than my small collection of eight, but I eliminated another six planned locations because of time or because they were simply too busy. It took a month to plot this out, and all I had were seven days to capture them. The weather, light, and acts of God would have to hold.

Most Los Angeles Scapes were captured at sunset, with some at night. Almost all of them were captured with the softer, more southern winter sun. Several locations would take up an entire day just because I couldn’t be in two places at once. But I strategized and picked spots across Los Angeles County that could be captured in seven days. My pilgrimage took me far and wide, from the barren but beautiful Mojave Desert to the gently beating heart of downtown Los Angeles.

[Author’s note: For maximum experience, I highly recommend listening to this short playlist I put together while reading this. Please enjoy.]

An Endless Desert

Searching for this spot took a light dose of Google Maps sleuthing with just a single clue from GT7: This is in Mojave, California. I happen to be familiar with the small town of Mojave and know that there isn’t much to look through. With the mountains in the background of the original Scape providing rough distance and location relative to the spot, I found a barren little cul-de-sac that fit the description perfectly, complete with Street View that confirmed the spot. Exactly 100 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, the first scape I ventured to with the LC 500 is a true panoramic of desert beauty.

This particular spot in the desert is not far from the Mojave Air and Space Port, a well-known airplane graveyard, hub for some private orbital flight test programs, and a one-time destination for national-level air racing. It’s at the so-called gateway to the Eastern Sierras, just a few miles away from state route 14 and US-395 that leads to the famous Lake Tahoe.

Windmills

I found this spot in largely the same way, using the mountains and windmills as references. It was actually a short drive of about 10 minutes from the previous Scape, located within a massive installation of wind farms that feed power to the state of California. The area is famous for its strong winds that come from the cooler air of the Central Valley feeding into the hot Mojave through the Tehachapi pass. That, and its remoteness from major civilization makes it ideal for a wind farm.

It also makes for an incredible landscape. Windmills have a certain vibe about them, and the spot is gorgeous at golden hour. I’d even say the Scape undersells this spot; there are more beautiful angles to be found facing the other way, but it’s still a serene spot under the blades in the desert beyond LA. But it was time to journey south back toward civilization and capture the more iconic Scapes the GT7 has.

The Urban Sunset

This was the spot that inspired everything. I originally went here in the Genesis GV60 to test the spot months before I finalized any sort of plan to do this and it was also the first moment that I figured out that this rather silly idea would work. I don’t get starstruck often, and I don’t care about celebrities. What moves me is a vision. Seeing what the team at Polyphony saw with my own eyes is beyond description. It was genuinely moving and made me giddy to see the rest. Once this shot lined up with the virtual thing down to the minutiae, the Scapes project was open for business. It doesn’t hurt that this shot is a stunner too.

Finding this shot was one of my more involved processes. The skyline and “Fashion District” designation in GT7 gave me a broad area to search, but anyone who knows the area east of Downtown LA knows it’s a mass of gray. So I picked out some landmarks, used my virtual reality headset for Google Earth VR which allowed me to place myself in situ with 3D buildings while flying around searching for the correct rooftop. After an hour of searching, using the dome just behind the LC 500 as my main reference, 1200 Wall St was the spot.

All that was left was the hope that the rooftop would be open. In LA, many parking lot rooftops are closed for various reasons, mainly to prevent people from loitering and staring at the LA skyline. The popular spots like Row DTLA, and Little Tokyo are either closed or heavily enforced. I struck gold here and found a quiet, beautiful view of Los Angeles. It’s one of my favorite spots to just exist in, beyond the fact that it’s a Scape.

A Crowded Crossing

Moving around within downtown Los Angeles, this one was more of a logistical challenge than an investigative one. With the amount of landmarks and the clear clue that it was Figueroa Street, finding it was simple. Shooting it would be a different challenge because it is a busy, one-way downtown street in the middle of rush hour. I requisitioned help from my friend Kate Gorbacheva, who is an excellent photographer and knew the particular detail I was looking in for my project. I trusted her to capture the shot while we coordinated with our phones to time traffic, lights, and when I would be crossing the frame. The bridge over Figueroa in Bunker Hill was the place we shot from, and Kate nailed the shot in a single try.