Gran Turismo 4 officially slips to 2005 in North America

Following on from yesterday's announcement of a fresh delay to the launch of Gran Turismo 4 in Japan, Sony has now confirmed that the title has also been pushed back to early 2005 in North America.

The often-delayed title was meant to launch on December 3rd in Japan and on the 12th in North America, but yesterday a terse statement from Sony Computer Entertainment's Japanese headquarters announced that the Japanese launch has been pushed back to December 28th.

Now Sony Computer Entertainment America has confirmed that this means that the game won't appear until 2005 in North America, with no firm date set at present but a February launch looking likely, according to retail sources.

"Natural challenges with finalizing all the key features and localization issues across worldwide territories have led to the difficult choice of pushing back the release date," SCEA said in a statement, "in order to ensure that Gran Turismo 4 lives up to the exacting standards of the 36 million-plus fans worldwide that have purchased previous versions."

The delay leaves egg on the face of Sony, who only last week held a high profile party in Tokyo to celebrate the "completion" of the game, and which previously removed the much-vaunted online functionality from the title in order to ensure that it came out in time for Christmas.

There's some speculation that this fresh delay - which may also have a knock-on impact on the launch date of the European version, which had already been delayed into Q1 2005 - will give the firm time to reintegrate the online component, but Sony has so far not commented on this possibility, and is still officially planning to launch a separate online-enabled Gran Turismo product later next year.