ALL ABOARD

How Stillalive Studios made following a route fun again in BUS BOUND

- Ian Evenden

PC gaming loves simulators. They put you in charge of exciting machines such as passenger aircraft, heavy goods vehicles, and even the space shuttle. What marks them out from games structured around combat or speed is the satisfaction you get from doing an otherwise mundane task well, rather than a kill count or a shiny trophy. In a simulator, you may never get a reward for your actions, no matter how well you perform.

Public transport is another simulator target that can seem strange to outsiders. While trains are constrained by their reliance on rails and thick books of regulations, driving a bus around a city to a timetable means providing an essential service to the NPCs, but does it tickle the reward centres of the brain in the same way as a Battlefield kill?

PCG spoke to Andrei Pandelescu, game director of Bus Bound at Stillalive Studios, to find out why a bus makes for such a good videogame. “Buses are awesome!” he begins. “Big, powerful machines that you see and use every day, at least in much of Europe, but most never get to see them from the driver's seat.”

Stillalive has a base in Austria but is a mostly remote team spread across Europe. It put out