Painful Moments in Gaming: Grant Turismo

Pretty much my whole family plays video games but occasionally, my brother and I would end up having little competitions. I still have all the old notebooks with the score for various one v one competitions that would span hours and sometimes days. My brother was an absolute demon at (bizarrely non cart based) driving games and anything to do with the Second World War and I was competent at beat em ups, kart games and FPS so often the competitions would be quite tight. One time we started to argue about who had 'completed' the most games. It was a stupid argument but he had completed more games than me so I insisted that it didn't count unless you had the save game to prove it. So we end up going into the memory card management screen of the PlayStation and counting up all the provable 'completions'. My brother argued that this system wasn't fair especially when games he liked took up more than one slot. In particular, Gran Turismo took up 5 slots, a third of a memory card so it should count five times (as if).


I'll point out here that my brother absolutely loved Gran Turismo (notice past tense) it was almost as if it was made for him. Virtual car porn with some gruelling challenges that really proved the mettle of a driving gamer. One of the hardest parts of the game was completing all of the licenses. The licenses start off easy enough, stuff like 'go in a straight line' in the time limit or go around a corner but then they quickly get harder and harder. I just don't have a brain for driving games so I'd just hit a mental wall and have to give up. My brother tried to tell me how to do it, it's about breaking and watching your speed and how you break etc. He'd busted all the licences, filled his garage with all kinds of tweaked beefy cars with ridiculous names and for all intents and purposes had 'busted' the game. So whilst we were looking at the save data I said to him "Can you imagine if I deleted GT?" to which he said "Oh man don't". I then hovered over the delete button and started swinging the pad near my leg "Can you imagine if it hits my knee?". "Oh man don't". That's when the pad hits my knee and we both watch as the five memory card icons for Gran Turismo disappeared. It was by complete (admittedly stupid) accident but I felt horrible inside, gutted. To my brothers credit, he didn't cry, he didn't punch me, he did revenge himself upon my memory card (including various Resident Evil achievements and Tomb Raider 100%s) he just never played Gran Turismo ever again. Which made me feel worse. I ruined his favourite game of all time. What a total cunt. Who does that? If you are reading this bro, I am still sorry about it.