Sim racing is flourishing, but what happened to the arcade racer? SimRacing Expo 2026 showed how much the genre has grown, while the casual racing scene is now largely concentrated in one series. I became a racing game aficionado at age five playing Lego Racers on my great grandfather's Windows 95 Gateway PC. And I've been a car enthusiast since my days careening the Subaru Impreza Rally Car '99 into walls on the dirt stages of Gran Turismo 2. But sim racing never quite did it for me, and that's become a problem, because sims have largely supplanted mainstream racing games. Bored during the pandemic and flush with cash after being laid off from my food service job, I bought a Thrustmaster T150 RS—an entry-level rig with a wheel, three-pedal box, and manual shifter (the third pedal and gearbox were extra). I drove my favorite tuner cars in Forza Horizon 4 and tried to make "realistic" driving videos like those viral guys on YouTube do with their thousand-dollar rigs. In sim racing, the sky's the limit; the logical conclusion of the genre is a hardware setup that reproduces every microscopic vibration of your in-game car via high-tech hardware like force-feedback steering wheels and haptic seating. It was fun, but it never quite stuck. Why? Maybe because my setup, despite being $300—a lot of money for a "casual" gamer to spend on what is, at the end of the day, a controller—provided an at best middling facsimile of the real experience of driving. The T150 RS actually has decent force feedback, but without spending another $2,000 at least on a basic FFB/haptic feedback sim seat setup, the rest of the experience felt about as akin to real-world driving as playing Gran Turismo on a DualShock gamepad. But as sim racing player