• by Karl Greenberg , May 7, 2012

Nissan is back for its third year of the GT Academy, a multiplatform competition that turns top players of digital driving games into drivers of real Nissan sports cars, and culminates in a reality show that's a kind of performance driving take on "Hunger Games," where gamers enter the real world, competing against each other in physical and psychological tests, and performance driving. Only one person "survives," and that lucky person will go on to be an actual race driver under the Nissan banner. 

For Nissan's North American operation, this is only the second year of paticipation in the GT Academy program. And as with last year, Nissan is partnering with Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC and Polyphony Digital Inc. to create a Nissan branded driving game in which gamers must compete for a chance to attend the GT Academy "boot camp," the portion that gets televised  as a non-scripted TV series Spike TV and MTV2 later this year.

The way it works is that gamers and racing fans compete in online time trials in pre-selected and virtual Nissan vehicles. Registration for the GT Academy competition runs from June 11-24, for 32 spots in the finals, to be held in July. The top 16 players in the country who won the finals move on to the GT Academy “boot camp.” 

Last year, 30-year old Californian Bryan Heitkotter won, and is now competing in races for Nissan in the United States, Middle East and Europe. 

The Sony GT Academy 2012 demo is a free online game for Sony’s PlayStation Network. Each participant has to compete in a series of virtual trials on the game, a demo version of Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 5 that showcases Nissan cars. There will be 40 different events over eight weeks. The last stage of the competition is an online time trial challenge. Only the fastest lap times will go up on the national leader boards, so in order to move up in the rankings, the player must continually improve their performance. 

Phil O’Connor, the senior manager of marketing, says the program is quite a bit different this year including the fact that people who want to participate don't have to buy the game. "This year Sony created a demo that is robust enough to completely use as a demo version. Since you don't have to buy it, anyone is eligible, so we expect to see significant increase in participation." O'Connor says last year about 57,000 gamers participated. "Our expectation is we will get much greater numbers." 

Also new are where the finals will be held and which network is covering the reality portion of the show, per O'Connor. He says the final virtual competition will be at the Hard Rock cafe in San Diego, at the same time as the Comicon convention, "So we are drafting off of that, and will get a lot more participation."

Also, last year the TV program of the "boot camp" event was on Speed. This year it's on Spike an MTV2. "They have a more robust promotional strategy and much broader distribution. And their viewer demographic is dead on." Last year, one of the takeaways was that not only players but also viewers were very active on social media when it came to spreading buzz. "Facebook proved popular, and we think having more people interested will generate that much more social buzz," says O'Connor, who adds that Nissan will be promoting the show on social media channels this year.