A DIY engineer has created a realistic tank simulator that puts the average haptic controller to shame. The mechanical monster is jury-rigged to the top of an office desk and must be reloaded with a new shell after every shot. The recoil is terrifying. It’s operated by three people: one person drives the tank with a steering wheel and levers, another uses cranks to aim the gun barrel, and a third reloads the shells that eject automatically from the chamber after every desk-lifting blast. The “shells” in question are 2-litre bottles of fizzy drink, and the crew has set up a whole rack of these bottles for panicked reloading. If you are the kind of person who yearns for the immersion of the legendary Steel Battalion controller then you will get a definite buzz from watching the death machine in action below.
Just look at that smoke. This is a reupload to YouTube – the original video was posted by homebrew engineer “malublyat” on Chinese video sharing site BiliBili. The video includes a link to World of Tanks, the free-to-play tank sim by Wargaming. That’s what the crew appear to be playing on the monitor, you see. It’s possible developers Wargaming have partnered with the engineer in a classic act of viral marketing, however the video description doesn’t say so outright. So it’s also possible the engineer is doing his usual thing. Because this is not the first ludicrous machine to come from this user’s channel.
Malublyat is described in Chinese articles as a “well-known tech uploader” (thanks to Jeremy for the translation). The engineer has a strong record of creating wild video game controllers and funny devices. Here he is building a mounted machine gun that glows so hot you can light a cigarette on it. And here is an anti-aircraft gun that can swivel around as you fire into the digital skies. You may have already seen this viral video on TikTok: a desk with built-in recoil to be paired with CS:GO.
Marketing stunt or not, I respect and fear the human ability to engineer wild (possibly unsafe) controllers for the purposes of entertainment. If you like this sort of thing, there were many other weird controllers and games on display at EGX a couple of years ago, including a game played with a Morse code machine and a warped pool table.