Red Dead Redemption 2 may have won Steam’s game of the year back in 2020 (opens in new tab) but it’s definitely not everyone’s shot of whiskey. While many love it for the cowboy adventure story with plenty of twists and turns others found it a bit of a slog. After all, it’s really not a game that respects your time with plenty of slow grind hunting and long slow conversations. For some, like myself it just was a bit too slow paced to enjoy.
This might have been an entirely different story if I’d seen this great hardware mod from back in 2021. While other people are modding the game to restore Mexico (opens in new tab) and give Arthur Morgan some daily jobs (opens in new tab), YouTuber and absolute madlad Teenenggr was turning his desk into a horse. Which also happens to be a chaotic, bouncy, and completely terrifying surface for a PC monitor.
In the video detailing this mod you can see Teenenggr’s process for achieving this real horse feel for his PC gaming experience. He attaches Arduino powered air cylinders to the legs of a desk, and has the game send them the horse speed to calibrate the movements. The result is a desk violently shaking in ways that do quite resemble the rocky rampage of a mountain ride. Completely throwing off its rider, or PC monitor.
Teenenggr fixes this by expertly duct taping the monitor and keyboard to the desk, but it’s still just as scary to watch. Plus we all know how much electronics love being violently shaking around. Is this a practical mod? No. Is it perfect in every other possible way. Maybe? It really looks like it recreates the feel of being jostled around by a horse. But perhaps a complete desk chair setup is more in order for full immersion.
If you’re looking at the video and thinking that a horse desk and it’s chaotic energy is exactly what has been missing in your life, Teenenggr (opens in new tab) has a full tutorial provided on their website. This includes the code required to get this mod working as well as the hardware building steps. Perhaps it’s time for the next champion to step up and make the chair to match.
If there’s one thing that could shake up Red Dead Redemption 2 enough to get me interested, this could literally be the ticket. Though I don’t think I’ll be risking any of my monitors on the project any time soon. At least there’s those wonderful horse girls running the kindest Rad Dead Online posse around (opens in new tab). I bet they’d make great use out of this absolutely manic haptic setup.