Schumi at work in a different kind of hot seat, circa 2003. Clive Mason/Getty Images Earlier this month, a Ferrari F355 Challenge arcade machine was listed for sale on Bring a Trailer, a website known better for auctioning off actual Ferraris. I’ve written about such a sale before and wasn’t about to retread that ground, until I saw the price this particular cabinet went for: $18,000. Even better, this unit was a triple-screen one—the most coveted of all the F355 cabs—and in pristine condition at that, considering its 27 years of age. So, let’s talk about why this thing is so cool, and why it went for a few grand less than an entire Hyundai. As a quick recap, Sega’s master game designer Yu Suzuki, the guy behind Out Run, Space Harrier, After Burner, and Hang-On, directed F355 Challenge with the intent of making a driving simulator that real professional drivers could excel at, rather than merely people good at video games. This may be the norm now, but it wasn’t back in 1999. Suzuki also owned an F355 himself, and so there was certainly a self-serving nature to the project, but who wouldn’t do the same if they liked cars and practically ran Sega in the ’90s? F355 Challenge was developed for the NAOMI arcade platform, which was functionally a Dreamcast home console with more RAM. This made the home port of F355 for Dreamcast identical to its arcade counterpart, which was rare for the time, at least if you’d never heard of a Neo Geo. But if you did step into the arcade and happen to come across an F355 cab, the triple-screen variant was the one you wanted to encounter. Less something you hop on and more into, it had three CRT monitors—each driven by its own NAOMI board—and features that other machines didn’t get, like a clutch pedal and the option of shifting with either a stick or those yellow paddles behind the steering wheel. Bring a Trailer Again, remember—this is 1999, and paddle shifters are still novel, having only been introduced to the road car market by Ferrari itself a couple of years earlier with the F355 F1. So, what we’re left with here is the ultimate expression of turn-of-the-century simulation tech, emulating the experience of driving the most technologically advanced Ferrari money could buy around the time of the new millennium. Plus, it just looks and sounds cool, even down to its menus. If you play F355 Challenge now, it won’t feel like a very realistic experience. The tire model is vague, to put it lightly, with no tangible limit of grip, so you can just kind of buzz sideways around corners. In fact, that’s precisely what the game’s best players did to set the fastest laps. However, it was definitely more demanding than anything that had reached arcades or consoles at that time. The braking distances are what immediately leap out to you; if you miss your mark, you’re not making the corner and, unlike even in Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport today, there’s absolutely zero grip off the black. Ferrari and Sega marketed this with the help of the Scuderia’s very successful drivers, Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello. It’s been said that Barrichello bought a unit just like this one for himself, but I have never been able to find evidence to back that up. Somebody should ask him. That answers the “why $18,000” question, I suppose, but beyond F355 Challenge’s historical significance and the near museum-quality condition of this particular example, it’s worth considering the state of modern gaming. Today, people have pretty sophisticated sim racing rigs in their own homes. The technology to simulate performance driving has never been better and will only get better. But the software, the soul in this equation, is gone, or at least mired in the cynicism and exploitation of late-stage capitalism. Everything’s a subscription service, and soon, nothing will come in a box or on a disc. If your sim of choice is iRacing—which, I agree, is very good—you might’ve spent thousands of dollars on your rig, knowing that if you let the $15-per-month or $125-per-year payments lapse, you’re left with a very cutting-edge paperweight. Sure, a machine like this auctioning for $18,000 is arguably a byproduct of the very same forces, but I also think it represents a yearning to return to a simpler, purer, less burdensome time in gaming, not unlike the yearning for the fully analog sports cars of 20 or 30 years ago. And boy, don’t we already know that the Bring a Trailer clientele likes to shell out for those. iRacing also doesn’t have an ’80s hair-metal soundtrack, proving that simulation needn’t be stuffy. Clive Mason/Getty Images, Sega
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