I have long been a fan of the Electronic Arts Need for Speed series of racing games. It seems to me in this technological age, the time has come to merge my passion for cycling and car racing games in service of my great apathy for doing any indoor training/exercise. I, therefore, present to you NFS: Indoor Bike Trainer Edition.

Not sure how many cyclists on here also enjoy car racing games, but as someone who was long into video games way before I was into cycling, the merging of the two passions seems only natural to me. I've been riding a lot this summer with the goal of getting faster and so have been playing less games. However, I live in the cold northeast, and will not want to go out and ride my road bike when it starts snowing out. It would be great if a gaming company would develop a game designed to be used with indoor bike trainers. There already is Zwift, which is an MMO that hooks up your bike trainer to your Smart TV or iPad enabling you to ride anywhere in the world (virtually of course) on real roads/courses against real people, but it's less of a game and more trying to simulate outdoor cycling, which doesn't really appeal to me as I do not enjoy games that try to simulate reality. I'd much rather have a scenario while I'm on my trainer where the simulation is that I'm driving a car and I'm in 2nd place, and if I pedal just a little harder I'll earn a turbo boost or in-game cash. This is possible to do because bike trainers have power meters. So if I were to sustain a certain power output for a certain amount of time, I'd earn the nitro boost or cash. For more serious cyclists, the game could be calibrated to specific training regimes. For example, when serious cyclists are training for an upcoming race, they'll have a goal to put down a certain amount of power for a set amount of time. So while you are trying to reach that goal on your trainer while playing the car racing game, you would be rewarded with the in-game cash when you successfully complete the goal to use to upgrade your car.

In NFS High Stakes (an old title from 1999) there were 4 classes of cars: B, A, AA, AAA. In career mode (The first career mode EA introduced into a car racing game) you started out driving B cars (BMW Z3s), and as you won races you earned cash to buy A cars and enter races against A cars (Corvettes), then AA (Porsche 911 Turbos), then AAA (Mclaren F1 GTRs). This format would be fitting for an indoor cycling adaptation as cyclists often do group rides from local bike shops with varying abilities. For example, my local bike shop offers a C ride for the non-competitive, casual cyclist, a B ride for the more serious cyclist and an A ride for those who really want to ride fast.

My idea is there would be two ways to engineer the game: either your fitness level is compared to all other cyclists playing the game, and would determine which cars you get to drive and which races you'd be able to enter. Or, a probably more popular way to do it, as the variation in cycling ability is so enormous, is to calibrate the game so that you can progress through the entire game to the top cars and tracks, even if you aren't actually a top cyclist.

In my vision of NFS: Indoor Bike Trainer Edition, you'd be incentivized to ride harder in order to earn a nitro boost or a cash bonus to be used for car upgrades, or simply to power your car passed the other guy. You could even have a virtual earpiece in the game, so that if you were close to the car in front of you, your "coach" would encourage you to ride harder in order to pass the guy. "Come on! You got this! Don't let off the gas now!" This would also be handy if you are calibrating the game to meet certain training goals.

The more sophisticated the software, the better the game would be. If you were to crash, then your bike trainer would enter "free spin" mode, meaning pedaling would have no resistance and no effect, until your car was reset on the road/track again. If you were to bump into a car in front of you and try to push them out of the way, your bike trainer's resistance would spike up in order to simulate the resistance of trying to push a car. The faster your car would go, the greater the bike trainer's resistance would become to simulate the increased aerodynamic drag cars (and cyclists) experience at high speed. When you go up a hill, the resistance would likewise increase (and some bike trainers actually have equipment that tilts the bike to really simulate climbing a hill on a bike, in addition to increasing the resistance).

When drafting cars in front of you, the trainer's resistance would drop, just as it does when cyclists draft each other.

Head-to-head multiplayer games would be super fun, as you could compete in races against real life cycling rivals. Perhaps the game could even have an option to handicap your opponent if he is a better cyclist than you in order to level the playing field so that your greatest effort pedaling would accelerate your car the same amount as your opponent's greatest effort pedaling, even if your opponent is putting down 30% more watts than you.

Any cyclists out there who have also dreamed of using their passion for cycling and car racing games to making in door training more fun?