Gran Turismo 3 Contained a Reference to a Mass Shooting That No One Spotted for Nearly 25 Years

Gran Turismo is my favorite gaming franchise of all time. I'd say that all of the first four games are in my top 10 favorite games of all time. Gran Turismo 3 is the second-best selling PlayStation 2 game of all time, only behind Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

To all the Europeans reading this, I'm sorry but the American intro is just better even though I love both.

It has always had a reputation for being an accessible franchise for everyone and the way it revolutionized driving games, and the third one in particular is the highest-selling game in the franchise.

All of this combined together will probably leave you very perplexed at the tile of the article. Gran Turismo 3 referenced a mass shooting? Where?

Let's look at the splash screen for the British GT Car Cup.

It's a bit hard to tell, but you can just about make out the following lines:

• Michael M. McDermott's parents, Richard and Rosemary Martinez, in Marsh yesterday
• Edgewater Technology employees memoralize.

Who is Michael M. McDermott?

Michael M. McDermott being taken into custody by police in Wakefield, Massachusetts on December 26 2000.

Michael Morgan McDermott is a man who worked at Edgewater Technology before inflicting a mass shooting upon the building and killing seven of his coworkers on December 26 2000, just about 4 months before the game released. According to this LA Times article published on April 25 2002 (one year after the game released), McDermott had claimed insanity when questioned about his motives for the shooting.

Quote From Elizabeth Mehrin

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Rejecting defense arguments that a software engineer believed he was traveling back in time to kill Nazis when he fatally shot seven co-workers, a jury on Wednesday found Michael McDermott guilty of seven counts of first-degree murder.

After 16 hours of deliberations, the 43-year-old McDermott–an imposing figure called “Mucko”–also was convicted on five felony weapons-related charges.

The only sentence in Massachusetts for first-degree murder is life in prison without parole.

McDermott opened fire just after 11 a.m. on Dec. 26, 2000, at his office at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield, north of Boston. As employees screamed and scattered, McDermott gunned down seven colleagues in one of the worst workplace massacres in U.S. history.

Police found the 300-pound McDermott sitting in the office reception area, armed with a 12-gauge pump action shotgun, an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle with an attached 60-round large capacity feeding device and a .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Prosecutors said McDermott was angry because his employer was planning to garnish his wages to settle a tax dispute with the Internal Revenue Service. Five of his victims worked in the accounting department, which was to oversee the IRS procedure.

But McDermott claimed he was insane. He testified that he had used a time portal in the lobby of his company’s headquarters to travel to 1940 Berlin to kill Adolf Hitler and six of his generals in order to stop the Holocaust.

In two days on the witness stand, McDermott calmly told the court that he had a mission from St. Michael the Archangel to prevent the Holocaust. He said he heard Hitler’s thoughts, and he sent family members of the victims fleeing from the courtroom in tears when he methodically described killing the “Nazis” one by one.

“The last Nazi was there. I shot and killed him. And Hitler was there. I shot and killed him,” McDermott testified. “My mission was complete. I knew at this point I had a soul.”

He also explained that he grew his hair long to silence a chorus of voices that talked incessantly to him.

When he was not testifying, the huge man with unkempt hair and a bushy beard spent his time in court reading the Bible.

Prosecutors revealed that McDermott bought a book on how to fake mental illness and researched the subject on the Internet. They said he carefully plotted his killings, taking target practice two days before his rampage. The story about Nazis, according to prosecutors, was a clever ruse dreamed up by McDermott to avoid prison.

“He’s absolutely faking,” declared Michael Annunziata, a psychiatrist and prosecution witness.

McDermott’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, countered in closing arguments that “this is, up close and personal, a very sick man.”

While not ignoring McDermott’s long history of mental illness–including treatment for depression and several suicide attempts–prosecutors maintained that he understood the consequences of his actions when he opened fire at his workplace.

“The lives of seven innocent people were taken in a cruel and atrocious act,” Middlesex County Dist. Atty. Martha Coakley said Wednesday. “Our goal from the outset has been to hold Michael McDermott responsible for his actions.”

But what about Richard and Rosemary? Do we know for sure that those are Michael's parents? I'm afraid so, because on January 1 2001, Rosemary was interviewed to speak about the actions of his son by The Cape Cod Times.

Quote From The Cape Cod Times

MARSHFIELD — Standing in the foyer of her Marshfield farmhouse, Rosemary Martinez welled up with tears and explained how she and her husband are coping with the reality that their son is facing the most heinous charges any parent could imagine.

"I've never had so many hugs in my life," Martinez told The Boston Herald.

She was visibly overwhelmed by the wave of support she's received since her son, Michael "Mucko" McDermott, was accused of gunning down seven unsuspecting co-workers.

In the first interview she's granted since her son's alleged rampage at Wakefield's Edgewater Technology Tuesday, the 70-year-old mother of four spoke passionately about her famil friends and said she's at a loss to explain what may have led to the unspeakable carnage.

"He's very sick," she said somberly of her 42-year-old Navy veteran son.

She and her husband, Richard, 70, have visited him in jail and spoken to him several times since the murders, but she declined to discuss his state of mind or what he's told them of the violence. She said he is aware and "cognizant," but she's not sure if he realizes the "enormity" of what's happened.

Sources have told the Herald McDermott was on several antidepressants, including Prozac and Paxil, to treat him for paranoia, schizophrenia and depression.

Notice her husband's name, Richard and their farmhouse location in Marshfield. This ties in perfectly with the lines in the event splash screen "Michael M. McDermott's parents, Richard and Rosemary Martinez, in Marsh yesterday" and "Edgewater Technology employees memoralize". The date on the newspaper of February 15 2001 is also significant because some news outlets, including CBS News, wrote an article about this incident on that exact day.

At this point, it's pretty much all but confirmed that the newspaper in the game refers to this exact event. As far as I can tell, this fact was first brought to life by YouTuber Roflwaffle on a video he posted on Gran Turismo event thumbnails on December 9 2025.

Now, why does this exist?

The first thing to remember is that Polyphony Digital are a Japanese company, and no matter how strong your localization team is, there will always be some semblance of a language barrier. I would guess that Polyphony just found a random newspaper somewhere and digitized it for use in the game without paying attention to what it actually said because the filler text is not the important part. While the picture of the Aston Martin Vanquish featured on the newspaper is well made to blend into the newspaper, the lines of text "FOR PROFESSIONAL" and "SINGLE RACE" are not. From the way these lines look much sharper than the filler text all over the newspaper, it's incredibly obvious that they were just slapped together after removing the text. The newspaper date of February 15 2001 is also only two months prior to the game's release, implying that this was one of the later events that they added to the game during its development cycle. Polyphony likely didn't care what the text at the top said because the players weren't supposed to care either. It was just supposed to be random filler text to make the newspaper look more like a proper newspaper.

And well, it worked. The game is nearly 25 years old now, and the fact that this reference even exists was only just discovered a few days ago. But how did it go under the radar for this long, especially given that this is the second best-selling video game for the best selling console of all time? How did nobody notice after all this time? I can't really give a definitive answer for why this slipped under the radar for so long other than the aforementioned fact that no one was supposed to really pay attention to it. Given that these things are just sort of out of the way of what you're really supposed to be looking at, it's understandable that most people wouldn't really look at the top or the bottom of the newspaper (since the bottom would be covered by the UI of picking what races to run). The text in general is also intentionally fuzzy and hard to read, perhaps because someone at the team knew what it was referencing or perhaps because the intended focus is on the bolded lines and Aston Martin Vanquish. Additionally, even if you could read it, there'd be little incentive to look up who Michael M. McDermott is. It's not unreasonable that one could just pass this up as random names made for a made-up sentence to fill in the newspaper space.

In any event, this is a very crazy and (mostly likely) unintentional easter egg that makes you think, and it's also quite weird to think that Gran Turismo, which has always been known to be a family friendly franchise where it's all about the cars, not only contains references to death and murder in its lore, but has apparently done so for decades. It was only a few years ago that people found out that Gran Turismo 4 has cheat codes. What other crazy hidden things in the old Gran Turismo games will people find next?