Gran Turismo 2 Has Been Remastered And It Might Be Our Game Of The Year

Picture the scene. You’ve finished a long, hard day at work. You’ve decided to treat yourself to a bit of Gran Turismo 2, and it’s been a while since you’ve played it. Suddenly, you’re met with a whole host of new cars and events to play with.

The year isn’t some alternate reality 2000 where your original PlayStation can download updates. Rather, it’s 2023, and after a bit of emulation trickery, you’ve just booted up Project A-Spec.

Some 24 years on from its 1999 release, a team of hobbyist programmers have taken it upon themselves to develop a huge mod for Gran Turismo 2, effectively remastering the game with a heap of fresh content and fixes that Polyphony Digital could never do.

Don’t worry about it spoiling the nostalgic feel of GT2. Each of the 30-plus cars so far added to A-Spec has been built from scratch to fit the feel of the game, and everything predates the ‘00s. Our highlights include a heap of ‘90s DTM cars, the ill-fated Mercedes CLR LMGTP racer and the original Renault Twingo, just to keep things down to earth.

No new tracks have been added (yet), though fresh events include a 99-lap endurance race, and some tweaks to existing races to breathe some new life into them. A-Spec has taken inspiration from a few other mods too, namely GT2+, to fix a few bugs and restore other content missing from the game’s original release.

Why now, when the game has just turned 24? We spoke with the brains behind the mod, known as Komputer on the community’s Discord server, who said it’s mainly “nostalgia” for the game now, and he doesn’t think “there’s a better way to celebrate” the landmark.

It’s taken some time to get to the point of release, though. Komputer said the mod has been in the works since 2020, largely fuelled by the Covid-19 outbreak. “I just wanted to find a way to distract myself,” he said, which we think was a much better use of time than learning to bake banana bread. This hasn’t been a one-man effort though, with several modders working on the project.

A-Spec has been described as “ongoing” too, so expect more cars and events to come over the next few months and hopefully years. It’s available to download now, with instructions available on the project’s Discord server. You can request new cars and features over there too, or just show some appreciation to the folks making one of the greatest racing games ever made even greater.