Project CARS Developer Is Teasing A New Console

The developers of Project CARS have made an announcement most people probably didn't see coming: the company is teasing a brand new game console. Yes, Slightly Mad Studios is teasing a brand new game console, and the name definitely fits in line with what you would expect from the studio that made one of the best realistic racing simulators this generation.

The news began to circulate the interwebs after the CEO of Slightly Mad Studios, Ian Bell, posted a tweet on his official Twitter account, announcing that the team is teasing the creation of the Mad Box, which will supposedly run games at full 4K UHD and at 60fps, which is a feat that is only doable right now on high-end gaming rigs with the latest and greatest GPUs.

The announcement on Twitter did not go down that well with the gaming community for a number of reasons, mostly because promising a device that can do 4K gaming at 60fps is a tall order that the current competitors haven't been able to pull off even after advertising those specs as core features for systems like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. In the case of the PS4 Pro, for $400 the system definitely improves on the performance of the standard PS4, but it rarely ever reaches native 2160p resolution, and in even rarer cases does it actually hit 2160p and 60fps for a true 4K experience.

The Xbox One X has done a much better job of delivering more native 4K titles, but it still fails to deliver the 4K at 60fps experience even at a $500 price point.

The tweet has a ton of responses from people exclaiming how doubtful they are about the Mad Box. There are also a lot of comparisons to Valve's Steam Machines, which were heavily promoted back in 2013 and 2014 but quickly faded from the consumer's view thereafter.

There have also been plenty of other competitors to try to squeeze gaming into a small form factor at an affordable price, such as the Ouya or the Nvidia Shield, but both still failed to ignite the public's interest.

Further down the thread, Ian Bell notes that the Mad Box will be able to run games at 120fps and run VR games natively without relying on re-projection like what the PlayStation VR does to achieve 120fps for a 120hertz output.

According to Bell, the new console is set to release within the next three years. This doesn't really explain how the console will be made available or what the actual price will be. Will it be sold through an online retailer or will it be on store shelves? Will it be customizable? If it supports VR then what will be the default control scheme be like and will it come with a controller or custom VR wands like the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift?

There are still a lot of questions, and most people think that this could have been Bell's attempt to get investors to take interest in funding the project. Right now there are still a lot of questions surrounding the Mad Box, but if it's real it could prove to be a potential foil for the next-gen Xbox or the upcoming PlayStation 5.