How a Nissan executive and Gran Turismo turned Jann Mardenborough from gamer to professional racing driver

You may not know the name Jann Mardenborough, but you’ve almost certainly heard of Gran Turismo.

What began as a pixelated racing simulator evolved into a tool so sophisticated that it turned virtual gamers into real-world drivers.

Through Nissan’s GT Academy, Mardenborough used the game to become a professional racing driver.

From his bedroom in Cardiff to the podium at Le Mans, his journey is probably the most intriguing underdog story of the digital age.

The evolution of gaming made this possible

Video games are a relatively recent invention.

The early games emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, but they looked nothing like the games we can play today.

Then, in the 1970s, Atari released ‘Pong’, which many consider the first mainstream hit.

What followed was an evolution that involved two main components.

First, video games evolved technologically.

These days, you can play games that look like movies.

If the game features human characters, you can count the veins in their arms and catch the distinctive glimmer of their teeth when they’re wet with saliva.

It’s uncanny.

And yet, that’s not the most important element at play here.

That’s because the second factor was crucial: video games went online.

In the past, you only had your friends to challenge, and even if you were the most popular jock in school, that pool was still pretty small.

Now, John Doe from Budapest, Georgia, can face John Doe from Budapest, Hungary, in a game of FIFA or Gran Turismo in real-time.

And they can do so even if they don’t speak the same language.

Scale that thought globally, and you’ve laid the foundation for the road that eventually gave people like Jann Mardenborough a real-world career doing something they learned with video games.

The Gran Turismo aces that went from gamers to real racing drivers

If we had a dollar for every parent who told their kid they’d ‘never amount to anything playing those video games’, we’d be rich.

The irony is, some gamers are millionaires because gaming is now a job.

Actually, it’s technically an eSport, complete with challenges, tournaments, and massive prizes.

But Gran Turismo took it one step further by doing something no one had ever done before.

In 2008, a former Nissan executive called Darren Cox came up with a groundbreaking idea and created the GT Academy.

It was simple, but revolutionary.

The goal was to give elite Gran Turismo players the chance to get behind the wheel of a real car.

Not a high-tech simulator but a real race car.

It wasn’t easy

Jann Mardenborough wasn’t the first winner, but he was the youngest – and the only one who can brag about having a Hollywood movie dedicated to his story.

In 2023, Hollywood decided to turn Mardenborough’s story into a motion picture with a relatively sizable budget: $60 million.

Aside from Archie Madekwe in the role of Jann Mardenborough (pictured above), the film also stars Orlando Bloom as Dany Moore (a fictionalized version of Darren Cox), David Harbour from Stranger Things, and former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell-Horner as Lesley Mardenborough, Jann Mardenborough’s mother.

We had the chance to speak to Darren Cox, and he told us a bit more about what happened behind the scenes.

Speaking to Supercar Blondie, Cox recalls the moment a life-changing lightbulb went off.

“[We were] at Bedford Autodrome. I compared lap times and realized the fastest players in the game also happened to be the fastest drivers on the track,” he said.

“So, logically, I figured at least some of them had to have potential to become real racing drivers, and that’s why I came up with the idea for the GT Academy.

But it wasn’t easy.

“I had a hard time convincing Nissan. Getting them to sign off on the project took three minutes in the movie, but in reality, it took me three years to get them to say yes,” he told Supercar Blondie.

Cox (pictured below) also admitted that several aspects of the story were glamorized in the movie.

“The way Orlando Bloom plays my character is a lot more corporate. [But] I don’t remember having a corporate jet. We were more EasyJet than corporate jet,” he joked.

Despite the movie being co-produced by Sony, Cox also explained that no one from the GT Academy, Gran Turismo team, or Sony was really hands-on.

“Once the Hollywood train leaves the Hollywood station, it’s down to the executive producer and the director,” he said.

Still, aside from the glamorization of his character and the ‘Hollywoodization’ of certain elements of the story, Cox said the movie is pretty accurate.

He was particularly thrilled with the casting of Orlando Bloom as Danny Moore, a fictional character based on Cox himself.

“I told my wife, and she said there’s no way an actor like that is going to play you,” he said.

“But it happened. It’s surreal.”

For now, this story is a one-off.

But who knows? Maybe 50 years from now, the F1 World Champion will be someone who started as a gamer.