A day in the F1 Arcade: This is what it’s like to drive a car

Confidence was my first mistake. As I sat down in one of the 83 racing simulators at the new F1 Arcade location in Washington, DC, I told the company’s CEO, Adam Breeden, that I had raced many times. I chose Semi-Pro difficulty, although Breeden told me he recommends most first-time arcade goers choose something easier. I adjusted the Vesaro simulator, started the race, and caused a six-car pileup in the first corner of the race.

Luckily, F1 Arcade is designed for fun rather than fidelity, so my race wasn’t over yet. It ended four minutes later in absolute last place as the timer on the screen mercifully ticked to zero. On a normal day at the arcade, this would signal that it’s time for someone else to race. For me, sitting behind the wheel a few days before the arcade opened to the public simply meant that my shameful ride was finally over.

F1 Arcade’s DC outpost is the company’s second location in the US – the first opened in Boston earlier this year, following the huge success of two UK locations. (Breeden says one location generated double its projected sales in its first year.) The project began several years ago when Formula 1 contacted Breeden about developing a more experiential product for racing fans. Breeden has been doing something like this for a while – he calls it “competitive socializing” – and has built brands in table tennis, mini-golf, bowling and darts – and says he immediately came up with the idea of ​​racing simulators. Millions of people have sat in arcade chairs and driven on-screen cars in games like… Cruis’n Worldand many people are willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a bike and pedals into their own home. A fun, social and competitive racing experience seemed like a winner.

All 83 simulators in this massive DC room are the same: an all-in-one machine built by a company called Vesaro. (The company sells a modified version of the setup, which it calls the V-Zero Mark II, for just under £40,000.) It has a steering wheel and two pedals, as well as a seat that rumbles and moves like your car does in the car Game. “If you play this thing with fully manual settings,” says Breeden, “functionally it’s a professional-level racing simulator.” He says his team is already working on new versions of the rig, but he’s also keeping up with the state of things satisfied. And he tries to make sure he thinks of everything – even the F1 Arcade’s food menus have been designed in part to ensure you don’t bring dirty fingers into the cockpit.

Racing simulators are by nature neither fun nor particularly social. Sims are complicated and require full attention, races take hours, and watching someone from heads-up view isn’t fun for long. For Breeden and his team, the most important thing about the F1 Arcade was making it a group activity.

This process began with the development of an entirely new game. Booting 83 copies of F1 24 just wasn’t an option. “Ultimately, console gaming isn’t really suitable for such a concept. It’s very complicated,” says Breeden. He thought what the arcade needed was a way for racers to just sit down and start racing without having to make a lot of decisions and wait through loading screens. It also had to be networked so people could compete against the person next to them or even everyone else in the bar.

F1 Arcade’s game is based on rFactor 2, a well-known simulator and rendering engine that is widely used and modified for various types of professional simulations. (It’s also the game that real-life F1 champion Max Verstappen angrily uninstalled last year after it crashed and cost him a virtual race.) Everything but the core racing experience has been modified for the arcade, says Breeden. “And it’s not just the software,” he says. “It’s the booking system, the points, how it leads to the leaderboards, how that powers the virtual currency we have.” The F1 Arcade team has also developed a completely online system for gameplay: you play the reflex game, by scanning a QR code instead of inserting a quarter and you win this virtual currency instead of tickets. It all took years and a team of engineers. Breeden says he’s much more of a tech company CEO than he ever expected.

The game features several different modes designed for personal racing. Most people will compete against the other people in their group – the arcade rents out simulators in 30- or 45-minute increments, just as you would reserve an alley for bowling. You can also team up and take turns competing against up to 19 other teams at the venue. And for the more experienced and competitive racers, the F1 Arcade features overall leaderboards and full-length races.

You don’t win by reaching the checkered flag, but by collecting points. Yes, you get points for being first at the end of the four-minute timer, but also for overtaking other racers and doing other things on the track. The idea is to give everyone a chance, even the newbies – each player chooses their skill level, which can range from essentially “full manual simulator” to “the car basically drives itself”, and the game should adapt, to keep everyone competitive. If you just imagine playing a photorealistic, really high quality version of Mario Kartyou will understand exactly how the F1 Arcade is supposed to feel.

Of course, when you’re not playing, the idea is that you eat and drink. And watch. Each simulator features two ultra-wide 49-inch ROG Strix displays stacked vertically in front of the seat. The bottom screen shows your race view, while the top screen shows something more like what you would see on TV, so the people behind you can watch the race and cheer you on. “It’s going to be a close race, everyone is banging on the back of the simulator and screaming and calling for their team,” he says. “And it’s just so participatory, exactly what you want.”

The F1 Arcade offers more than just simulators. There’s a huge, upscale bar with a menu overseen by Netflix season one champ Lauren Paylor O’Brien Drinking Master. There are other games, such as a light wall, designed to test your reflexes. Most of the decor has something to do with Formula 1 in some way: the ceiling lights are in the shape of various tracks or telemetry data from cars, and there are those iconic round red lights everywhere. Breeden insists that the success of these places lies in appealing to people who don’t care about the activity and just want a place to relax; The people who love racing are going to come anyway, you know? Still, it’s a room full of simulators.

A lot of the arcades take into account the fact that everyone is a gamer these days and that modern socialization so often involves screens. This collision between the digital and real worlds is happening everywhere: Nintendo built an AR Mario Kart experience at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and Osaka, Dave & Buster’s is full of mobile games and VR headsets, and kids hang out indoors Roblox And Fortnite just like they hang out at the mall. This is all fine with Breeden. He’s just trying to build something worth leaving the house for.