The Nissan PlayStation GT Academy TV series was picked up by over 160 broadcasters worldwide and generated hundreds of digital and paper column inches of PR. The game demo Gran Turismo needed for sign-up was downloaded over 1.3 million times, the most ever for a single title on PlayStation. Other markets have now taken an interest in creating fully localised versions of GT Academy, with the US and Japan already planning their own series’.

The drivers at the GT Academy were coached and judged by racing legends Eddie Jordan, Johnnie Herbert and Sabine Schmitz. The intense week long programme included dogfights in Nissan GT-R’s to tackling military assault courses, judging and whittling down the group until one worthy driver was left standing. Content is at the heart of this idea, with daily blogs, tweets and webisodes filmed and uploaded at the end of each day so the thousands of fans and millions of almost-applicants could follow the action as it happened. Fast cars, big dreams and a heroic journey also made the perfect ingredients for a Primetime TV show and we turned every moment of GT Academy into a 6 part series in stunning HD – for a global entertainment junkie audience of TV viewers and PlayStation gamers.

We had to prove that Nissan make the worlds best race cars… and promote PlayStation’s flagship title Gran Turismo - the world’s most realistic racing game. The insight was simple - all gamers dreamt of racing the word’s fastest cars for real and Gran Turismo was the closest they could ever get to it. We wanted give gamers a chance to prove their skills on a racing track, so we created the Nissan PlayStation GT ACADEMY – a real life racing school with a single, compelling promise… That the world’s 20 best gamers could enter and that one would leave as a professional racing driver – for the official Nissan PlayStation team in the Le Mans 24 Hour! Based at Silverstone, this week long school took in gamers from across the world to test their instincts and hone their skills – embodying the PlayStation belief that ‘The Game is just the start’.