A player once broke all records in Gran Turismo 3 and reached an absurd top speed with his car. But how was that even possible?
Without high speeds, racing games and car races would not be fun. But what happens when a player breaks the boundaries of imagination and reaches a speed that lies beyond all physical laws?
That is exactly what happened in 2022, when a player in a classic racing game reached a breathtaking speed of 3,450,039,922 km/h.But how did this incredible phenomenon come about?
A classic with surprises
The game in question is Gran Turismo 3.The racing game was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2001. Developer Polyphony Digital is still responsible for the Sony-exclusive series today, which in 2022 with Gran Turismo 7 tapped into the PlayStation 5 for the first time.
Despite its age, this game still holds secrets and surprises, as the speed record set by YouTube user MrResistanceand impressively proven by
On February 16, 2022, the player posted a video showing his car, a Suzuki Escudo, accelerating to more than three times the speed of light , as a user in the comments calculated.
The wheelie trick
The key to this extreme speed lies in a special programming error known as the “wheelie glitch”. This occurs when certain vehicles in the game are modified to perform a wheelie while driving.
Through specific adjustments to the aerodynamics and suspension, the vehicle can be manipulated so that the front wheels lose contact with the ground. In this state, the game misinterprets the speed of the vehicle, resulting in the astronomical speed values – a trick.
While the camera loses track of the car, MrResistance’s speedometershows the absurd speed of 2,147,483,647 miles per hour
Fast, but not as fast as the Enterprise
Converted to kilometers, that makes over three billion (!) kilometers per hour, or 3,450,039,922 km/h to be precise. In the comments section, user Alientank writes that this corresponds to 960,011 kilometers per second The speed of light is almost exactly 300,000 kilometers per second, exactly 299,782 km/s.
This means that the extraordinary video shows a speed three times the speed of light; enough to go around the Earth 21 times in one second (). This makes the Suzuki Escudo incredibly fast, but it would still be embarrassed to make an appearance in well-known science fiction universes.
In Star Trek the car would only just about manage between Warp 1 (light speed) and Warp 2 (eight times the speed of light). If you compare the speed with the hyperspace drive from Star Wars, it seems even punier.
According to the calculations of an internet user, Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon is the fastest spaceship in the galaxy, with a top speed of 37,116,120 times the speed of light Just trying to visualize this number makes us feel dizzy. But maybe this record will also be broken at some point.
