Cuphead is coming to Teslas and I pity the drivers

Over the weekend, Elon Musk revealed to IGN reporter Ryan McCaffrey on a podcast that Tesla would be porting indie platformer Cuphead, of all games, to work in its cars. It can only be played via a USB gamepad and, given which game we’re talking about, I fully expect to see several of them launched out of the windows of Teslas.

According to Musk, the game will be available on Tesla Models X, 3, and S. Like previous games that have made it into Teslas, it can only be played while the car is parked. It won’t be the whole game built into the car — there’s only enough storage space for the first island, but I’ll remind you that island contains two painfully tough platforming levels and five boss fights. They’re far from the hardest in the game, but they still take quite a bit of grit and determination to power through.

I do wonder whether this is a wise game to offer during drivers’ downtime. Cuphead‘s not exactly Stardew Valley: it’s not really a chill game that can be picked up or put down at leisure. Maybe y’all’s experience was a little different from mine, but when I played, Cuphead inspired in me the most pure, incandescent rage I’ve experienced in a while. I mean, it’s Contra by way of a Fleischer cartoon.

That worked in the game’s favor when I was playing it — I’m a stubborn little cuss, and when I get a rage-crush on a game, I want to power through it until either I break or it does. In the case of Cuphead, I played and played and played until I beat each battle even if it took hours, just for that sense of aaaaaaaahh that came at the finish line. (Cuphead eventually started crashing my PC so often I was never able to finish it, but I call that a default win for me.) If I hadn’t allotted myself enough time to do that, I probably would have broken my beautiful Scarborough Fair controller.

So how do you think I’d have felt if I had to stop before winning because I had to drive home, pumped full of adrenaline and undirected anger? I can only imagine I wouldn’t be the most sane or safe driver on the road. Now I can only hope the percentage of the population who drive Teslas don’t overlap with the percentage who are like me — though considering there were at least two who thought it’d be a good idea to film a bedroom video while the car was on Autopilot, the likeliness of there being no roadragers seems slim.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

I’m not saying Cuphead is going to cause car crashes. Just if we start seeing an overabundance of enraged Tesla drivers blowing through red lights and cutting off other cars after a trip to the charging station, we might know who the likely culprit is.