Hey, what's up everybody? My name is Nolan. From Past Gas by Donut Media, we are an automotive

history show. It's kind of like hand that garage with your friends listing them tell a great

story from automotive history. On our next episode of Past Gas, the year is 1870, and a

samurai has just started a trading operation in a Japan still coming to grips with the modern

world. Through hard work, ingenious engineering, and perhaps more than a little war profiteering,

that company would later grow to be Mitsubishi, one of the largest companies and one of the world's

largest economies. But how did sales plummet to just 15% of their peak in a few short years?

How did the company watch Volkswagen's dieselgate unfold and then top it? And is Mitsubishi responsible

for the trend of naming mid-size crossovers after once iconic performance models? All that and more

on this week's Past Gas as we learn about the rise and fall of Mitsubishi.

On December 23rd, 1997, Kazunori Yamauuchi wandered through the maze-like streets of Tokyo.

He had barely stepped foot outside for the past five years. He'd been literally

living in a different world, a virtual one. Couped up at an office with a small team of programmers,

he'd spent that half a decade building a completely new sort of racing game, a game he dreamed of

since childhood. In that time, he'd slept most nights under his desk. Just like when he was a kid,

his dreams must have been filled with visions of cars zooming around tracks in an endless loop.

Now, Kazunori's quest was complete. He'd been awakened from his translike state and returned

to the real world, where he now had nowhere in particular to be. It was a cold and overcast winter day

in Tokyo, but Kazunori noticed masses of people lining up outside the city's ubiquitous textores.

The crowds were there to buy Kazunori's game, the one he'd been working tirelessly to create for

half a decade. Although none of the people would have recognized the man who is now watching

them from a distance. If you haven't already guessed, Kazunori's passion project was grand

...