Polyphony Digital Ruins a Perfectly Good Bet With Gran Turismo 5 Delay

Goddammit. It wasn't a week ago that I was relishing in scheming over the delightful specifics of how I would make Disney Interactive's John Vignocchi make good on our wager concerning Gran Turismo 5's pending release. If you missed the E3 2010 podcast where Johnny made his guest appearance, here's the gist: if Gran Turismo 5 didn't make its November 2nd release date, we would have to produce a custom Giant-Bomb-style caricature of Mr. Vignocchi. But if it did make its November 2nd release date, I would get to shave my initials into his rich, generous chest and back hair. Before you start making any weird assumptions about my personal peccadilloes, know that there is precedent for alphanumeric body hair patterns and John Vignocchi.

Clearly, the stakes for this little gambit could be no higher, and with less than a month until the proposed release date, I figured I had it in the bag. You can only imagine my chagrin when I woke up this morning to news from the official PlayStation Blog that Gran Turismo 5 will not be making its November 2nd release date. While Polyphony Digital's monkeywrenching of my diabolical plans to make John Vignocchi's fiancee hate me is my primary point of interest in this development, it's nonetheless disconcerting that, beyond claims of commitment to perfectionism, no specific reason for the delay has been given yet, and no new release date has been announced, other than "holiday season." That actually wouldn't worry me so much, except that when Kotaku inquired about whether that would rule out the possibility of Gran Turismo 5 slipping into 2011, Sony wouldn't officially comment either way. 

Now I'm no game developer, but Gran Turismo 5 has been in development for a long, long time, and unless some 11th hour, game-breaking bug just cropped up, I can't imagine what you might accomplish within a month, or even three months, that would be worth sacrificing your premium release date for. Hopefully Sony and/or Polyphony Digital will shed some light on all this sooner than later.