Ezra Dyer: Chevy Silverado ZR2 Bison Goes Off-Road to Fetch a Sega Arcade Game

I figured the Chevy Silverado ZR2 Bison was probably overkill. A ZR2 Bison is probably overkill for most situations, but fetching a few arcade games from somebody’s house seemed below its pay grade. Hitch a trailer, load up in the driveway, done. Not much occasion for Multimatic spool-valve dampers and locking differentials there, to say nothing of the Bison’s extra AEV underbody armor. But that’s the nice thing about the new breed of extraordinary off-road pickups: they still work as trucks, when called upon. So I grabbed a trailer and set my GPS to go meet a guy named Tom. Easy enough, right? Later, after I’d seen Tom’s 200-mph motorcycles and homemade cannon and we’d set the woods aflame with a fireworks launcher, I realized that the game-for-anything Bison fit into this project a little bit better than I’d anticipated.

Tom had some arcade games for me, in various states of functionality, from mint to fixer-upper. The trophy machine, exhibiting indeterminate problems booting up, was a two-player 1998 Sega Rally 2 Championship imported from Japan by a U.S. military member who was stationed there. This is one of the coolest driving games ever built, featuring cars like the Lancia Delta HF Integrale and Toyota Celica GT-Four. Each driver gets a manual transmission (complete with clutch) and a handbrake. The top of the machine is crowned with driving lights fitted in a red steel tube frame. All told, the whole thing weighs nearly 1200 pounds. Fortunately, it can be disassembled into three pieces, but extricating it from Tom’s house would turn into a project that actually called for the ZR2 to flex its chops. That’s because the games would need to come out the front door, and Tom lives on 200 acres, roughly one of which is between his driveway and the aforementioned door—up a short flight of untrustworthy steps. “Those front steps were rotten when I bought this place 23 years ago, and now they’re worse,” Tom advised, as we assessed the game-extraction possibilities.

So, we’d have to wrestle 500-pound machines out of the house without using the steps. I quickly realized that the only feasible approach (at least, that wouldn’t end with me crushed beneath a Sega Rally 2 Championship steering wheel) would be to detach the truck from the trailer, maneuver it over to the front steps and load each side of the game individually into the bed.

The Right Tool for the Job

The ZR2 proved the perfect tool for the job. Its increased ground clearance relative to a normal Silverado’s put the dropped tailgate level with the front door. Low-range four-wheel drive let me inch up to the house to get the truck in the perfect position. And the ZR2’s softer suspension is just the thing when you’re hauling fragile old video games over uneven terrain. That cushy suspension tune means that the ZR2’s max payload—1520 pounds—is the least of any Silverado 1500, but still plenty for the mission.

After a few trips up to the house, we’d refined the method: Throw a game in the bed of the truck, haul it out to the driveway, lower it to the ground, and wheel that sucker into the trailer. The Sega, though, was so heavy that we didn’t want to deal with extraction from truck to trailer, so we tackled that one last and left it in the bed. In the process, I learned that Tom is what you might call a fan of adrenaline.

Dangerous Things

In his sixties, with long hair and a surfeit of energy, Tom has a playground of dangerous toys. In his barn, several terrifying motorcycles, including a Honda RC51 twin-cylinder race bike, were parked nearby a homemade cannon that could be used to fire rocks at metal targets hung in an adjacent range he dug with his excavator. There was a Honda 250L Rally dual-sport bike parked outside, but he said he was selling it because it didn’t have enough power to wheelie over obstacles in the woods. Soon enough, Tom pulled out what I’d describe as a fireworks gun, along with handmade shells bearing labels like “Dragon Eggs.” Soon after that, we were energetically shoveling dirt on a small-to-medium fire out in the woods, because it turns out you want to shoot Dragon Eggs straight in the air and not on a 45-degree angle over the trees. No problem!

After about 10 minutes of Dirt CrossFit, it was all put out, or at least extinguished enough for Tom to finish the job later with the excavator. Lest you pigeonhole Tom as devoted solely to horsepower and explosions, one room of his house was filled with guitars, and the sole car in the garage was a genteel and understated Lexus SC430. “I bought it from a little old lady.” he said. “It’s a hardtop, it’s a convertible, it’s a Lexus with a big V-8, and it was $7000! What more do you want?” I can’t argue with any of that, so I don’t.

Driving the Chicken Truck

I wondered how Tom afforded all these cool toys, and he was happy to explain. “I did a few years of college, but never finished,” he said. “I ended up buying a chicken truck and driving it. I’d get paid $1.43 a mile and do 600 miles a day, so 3000 miles a week. You do the math! What other blue-collar job is gonna pay a couple hundred grand a year? I loved it. Driving isn’t even like work. You’re just sitting there, and it doesn’t smell because the chickens are behind you. But if I could tell you how many little old ladies passed me at 100 mph because they didn’t want to be behind the truck . . .”

Tom bought the arcade games when his kids were little, and now that they’re grown up he’s got other plans for that room of his house. And I’ve got plans to fix the Sega, which initially booted up on one side but not the other and then refused to start up at all. As I bemoaned my inability to sling virtual dirt in a bellowing all-wheel-drive gravel monster, I remembered that the real thing was still sitting right outside, waiting for someone to push the start button.

Source