Tesla owners stuck in park are getting a new game to play. Elon Musk revealed in a podcast that 2017 bullet-hell shooter Cuphead is being added to the Model 3, Model S, and Model X. Interestingly, the cartoon-inspired hit managed to hit Tesla vehicles before the PS4 (it was only released on Xbox One and PC).
“Cuphead, we’ve got working,” Musk said. “[The developers] have been helping us make it work. It’s a cool game. It’s insanely difficult. It’s sadistically difficult. It’s a twisted plot. It’s dark. It looks like some cute little Disney thing and you’re like, ‘This plot is very dark’,” he added with a laugh.
The game will be added to Tesla vehicles very soon, but there’s a caveat. Due to storage limitations, only a portion of the game will be playable.
Musk had recently tweeted about how he and his team have been porting the Unity game engine, which Cuphead runs on, to work in Teslas. According to Maja Moldenhauer from Studio MDHR, the developer of Cuphead, the Tesla version is looking good and already running “nice and clean.” Studio MDHR and Tesla are targeting a release date of later this summer, and the in-car version will only include the Inkwell Isle One section of the game, due to the storage limitations of Tesla vehicles (which Musk discusses in the interview).
Cuphead’s developers say the game should perform very similarly to its console and PC counterparts. The game hasn’t been updated with touchscreen controls, so Tesla gamers will need to plug in a controller.
“When Tesla reached out to us to bring Cuphead to their vehicles, we were thrilled!” Moldenhauer said. “Finding out that Mr. Musk was a fan of our game was extremely humbling and getting a chance to work with such an innovative company has been really exciting. We hope Cuphead can add some classic fun to such forward-thinking vehicles.” She told me that their only requirements in agreeing to the project were that “it has to play super, super clean” with regard to framerate (“It’s a tight game,” she said), and that it had to control precisely. As such, only a wired USB controller will work with the Tesla version; you cannot play it using car’s touchscreen controls.