Development began around January 1999 while its predecessor Gran Turismo 2 was still in production. The game was originally announced as a PlayStation 2 launch title under the working title Gran Turismo 2000, demonstrated at E3 2000 and E3 2001. The shift to next-generation hardware required substantially more development effort than anticipated, and the launch window slipped from 2000 before the game eventually released in 2001. A playable demo labeled Gran Turismo 2000 was made available at the PlayStation Festival 2000, allowing players to drive a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution V on the Seattle Circuit for 120 seconds.
Creator Kazunori Yamauchi collaborated with Logitech on the GT Force steering wheel, a force-feedback peripheral designed specifically for the game and released alongside it.
Gran Turismo 3 reduced the car roster dramatically compared with its predecessor, from 650 cars in Gran Turismo 2 to approximately 180, in order to fully exploit the PlayStation 2's hardware capabilities for detailed car modeling, physics, and graphical presentation. The tradeoff was a significant generational leap in visual fidelity, physics behavior, sound design, opponent AI, and environmental detail.
Gran Turismo Mode, the primary single-player campaign, featured a structured and progressively organized arrangement of races, championships, license tests, and endurance events. Car shops were organized by country and manufacturer. Completing every 25 percent of the game unlocked a prize car. The Arcade Mode organized tracks into difficulty stages, with all tracks in a stage requiring completion on Easy or higher to advance, while Normal and Hard completions unlocked additional cars.
Nineteen race courses were available, fourteen with reverse variants and four as dirt tracks. Most circuits were fictional, though California's Laguna Seca Raceway and a Cote d'Azur layout heavily based on the Monaco Grand Prix circuit were included as real-world representations.
The game included unlicensed versions of six historical Formula One cars in the Japanese and American releases, coded using designations that encoded information about engine cylinder count, chassis year, and the driver associated with each car. One example, the F094/S, represented the 10-cylinder 1994-season car driven by Ayrton Senna; the F686/M represented the 6-cylinder 1986 car driven by Nigel Mansell. The PAL release substituted two generic Polyphony-branded F1 cars instead. A Lamborghini Diablo racing car and a Porsche 911 GT3 were present in the game code but inaccessible through normal play in any release version.
Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec received universal acclaim. Famitsu awarded it a near-perfect score of 39 out of 40. NextGen called it "the best, most complete, and most impressive driving game so far, lapping its predecessors handily — and the first must-have for PlayStation 2." Reviewers consistently praised its graphics, physics realism, sound design, and control fidelity. The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences awarded it the Console Racing prize at the 5th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, with additional nominations for Console Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering.
GameSpot named Gran Turismo 3 the fifth-best console game of 2001 and awarded it Best Driving Game. Retro Gamer readers later ranked it 97th among all-time retro games, with the publication noting its combination of realistic handling and extensive licensed vehicle content as the foundation of the series' dedicated following.
The game sold one million units in Japan within three days of launch and shipped one million units in North America on its first day alone, setting a speed record for software launches in that region. By March 2002 worldwide sales exceeded eight million units, growing to over eleven million by March 2003. Final shipped figures totaled 1.89 million in Japan, 7.14 million in North America, 5.85 million in Europe, and 10,000 in Southeast Asia, for a global total of 14.89 million copies. It received a Double Platinum sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association in the United Kingdom. In the US market alone, the game had grossed more than $120 million by July 2006.
Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec established the PlayStation 2 as the definitive platform for sim racing during the sixth console generation and defined audience expectations for the genre. Its decision to prioritize depth of simulation and visual quality over breadth of car count was vindicated commercially and critically, setting the development philosophy that Polyphony Digital carried into Gran Turismo 4 and beyond. A companion release, Gran Turismo Concept, was distributed in Japan and parts of Europe and Asia in 2001 and 2002, featuring vehicles from major motor shows and providing a save file that unlocked all licenses and a credit balance for use in Gran Turismo 3.