Making It Look Easy

I hear this a lot at GameTruck parties, “So you just threw some video games in a trailer?” Man, if it had only been that easy.

In 2005 when I first started to explore the idea of building my video game dream living room on wheels, I could not find a single example of anyone doing anything like this. Every single example of video games in vehicles was semi-tractor trailer rigs, you know? Those giant forty-foot trucks. They set up at air shows, and spring training games, or Motocross events. They had huge generators, tents, and kiosks. Nowhere to sit and play. Definitely not something you could pull into a neighborhood cul-de-sac, set up quick and get away quick.

We needed the biggest self-contained box we could pull into virtually any neighborhood and get out of. The key words here are “self-contained.” We had to be able to bring everything we needed with us, and take it away. Oh, and it had to be quiet. We could not show up like a carnival and violate every noise ordinance.

This is why I built a prototype in my garage. It started with space. I did not want a space that felt like a sardine can. I wanted to feel like we could spread out. So I measured the maximum legal road width for any trailer, then pulled it in four inches on a side to allow for the insulated walls we would need.

The next constraint was the TVs and the seating. Could we get far enough away from the TVs to feel comfortable? It turns out our eyes have a somewhat fuzzy, but definitely finite field of view. If you get too close to that limit it starts to get uncomfortable because our eyes scan to take in the whole picture and this is exhausting.

This meant the thickness of the screen and the depth of the seating impacted the overall experience. How comfortable a seat could we find and still comfortably take in the biggest screen we could fit on the wall?

We found with a roughly six-foot gap, the magic ratio was a 50-inch screen for a standard couch¹. If you went narrower than a typical couch, say you went with a bench, comfort started to be a real issue. No one wanted to sit on a wood bench for two hours. So the intersection of comfort, distance, and viewable size gave us our constraints.

We evaluated all kinds of TVs, but again, and again we came back to needing as flat a TV as possible, and in late 2005, early 2006, the only choice that made our GameTruck setup work was a plasma 50-inch TV made by Panasonic.

We had our ideal screen, big, flat enough to get far enough away from your face that it felt big without being uncomfortable. It just introduced two new problems: Power and Heat.

Today we’re used to these impossibly thin, superbright, ultra-high definition, light TV screens, which you can buy for a few hundred dollars.

Each Panasonic 50-inch plasma TV retailed for $2,500 in early 2006. Four of them were$10K. And they were cheap compared to the screens of just a few years earlier which cost $7,000 a piece. However, these screens were power hungry. Each one soaking up as much energy as a small dorm fridge, at around 450 watts each.²

They also ran hot. Put one in a living room and no one would notice. But put four of them in a small wooden box with no real airflow? I was building the first air fryer and didn’t know it.

In fact, four of them together drew more power than most home outlets can deliver, and I hadn’t added any video game consoles yet… or the real generator of heat. People.

I knew from working the game studio that people generate a lot of heat. And I lived in Tempe, Arizona. GameTruck would be great in the winter, but if I wanted a year-round business, we needed to find a way to manage the heat.

That led us down the path of examining how much AC to use. A twenty-foot trailer that is about 8 feet wide is only 160 square feet. Any normal roof-mounted RV AC unit can easily cool that amount of space… unless it is:

1. Packed with heat-generating electronics
2. Full of people playing with those electronics
3. Running in an environment above 100 degrees.

In ideal conditions, these units can only drop the temperature 20 degrees below ambient. That would mean on a 110 degree day in the summer it would be 90 inside the trailer, in ideal conditions, and who gets ideal conditions?

I decided to take the extraordinary step of adding TWO AC units to our roof. 15,000 BTU³, the largest roof-mounted units we could find. The trailer manufacturer looked at me like I wanted to stuff 30K of BTU cooling into a closet. And then I did something that really made his head spin. Something that, as far as I could tell, no one had ever done. I had him install the units rotated 90 degrees. “You want them installed sideways?” he asked incredulously. “Yes, I do,” I replied confidently. “I’m towing a small house, I care more about cooling than aerodynamics.”

The units were designed to sit on the roof with minimal drag. They had a sloped nose meant to point forward. However, inside the trailer their fans blew in the direction of travel inside the box. Normally this is what you want, but in our application that would mean cold air blowing down the aisle. But in a game theater that is not where the heat comes from. All our heat is on the sides, half of it coming from the couch with the kids, and the other half coming from the TVs and video game consoles.

By turning the AC units 90 degrees, the cold air could blow directly on the kids and the games, where I needed it. To take advantage of this, I also put the consoles on a shelf - out in the open. We did not put them in cabinets or drawers. They needed air to flow over and around them for their fans to keep them cool.

Early in my career, I worked in England during a heat wave. It reached ninety degrees. As an Arizonian I laughed at the Brits’ reaction, but then realized our offices were not air conditioned. By midafternoon our computers overheated and conked out. I did not want the same thing happening to our game consoles.

Over the years many people asked me why I didn’t put PCs in the trailer and there are a lot of reasons, but the number one reason was heat and power. In 2006, a typical PC power supply was 500W, and you needed one PC for every player.

Think about that. 500 x 16. I would have needed 8 kilowatts of power just for the computers, and every computer would have needed a screen… We’d be looking at something like 15 kilowatts of power and most of that energy would turn into heat. A box like that would have been an absolute oven. In contrast, I could use four Xboxes (which pulled 150W each) to entertain sixteen players comfortably on our four 50-inch TVs.

By the time all was said and done, I had two 1,800-watt AC units, and 2,500 watts of video games and TV. Total power? Just over 6,000 watts.

That was a lot lower than a bunch of personal computers, but how was I going to power that? Fortunately, Honda had the answer in the shape of three 3,000-watt ultra-quiet inverter generators. I hooked up one to each AC, and the third for the TVs and game systems. 9,000 watts of quiet portable power.

So, yeah, it might have looked like we just threw video games in a trailer, but there was actually a lot of engineering that went into the whole design.

I did not invent video games, flat-panel TVs or portable generators, but as far as I am aware, no one had put them together the way I did until I built the first video game theater in 2006.

It wasn’t just games in a box, I had crafted an ideal experience to sit back and enjoy the best console games with your friends, in a climate-controlled environment that would let you play for hours.

And that was the point, not what I could throw in the box, but what gamers could get out of it, hours of comfortable fun.