2020 Nissan GT-R 50th Anniversary Edition Review: An Overnight Legend Long in the Making?

Auto123 reviews the 2020 Nissan GT-R 50th Anniversary Edition, marking a half-century since the “GT-R” name first appeared on a car

I’m not sure what your description of “legend” is, but to me, while a lot of it has to do with accomplishments, notoriety and so forth, there seems the need for a little bit of mystery, too. After all, it’s hard to consider something that’s easy to define as “legendary”.

Take the Nissan Skyline GT-R, for example. While the model itself has been around for decades, North Americans really only knew about it by reading various car buff mags from Japan and Europe. Or, perhaps more likely, by playing video games like Gran Turismo or The Need For Speed. Heck, even the latter – a popular gaming franchise in its own right – didn’t get the Skyline in a North American version of one of its games until 2003’s Need for Speed: Underground – about a decade after the franchise got its start.

That also happened to be right around the time Paul Walker drove one in 2 Fast 2 Furious and just like that, the Skyline GT-R was everywhere, though unless you were an avid Gran Turismo player, you’d likely never heard of it. A legend one year in the making, then?

Well, not quite, because the pride of Tochigi, Japan has been around – in a number of forms – for years: performance coupes, sedans (even wagons!) have seen success both on the road and on the track since the ‘60s. But for a long time, Nissan just didn’t see a market for it here.

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