Assembly
Without a doubt, assembling your Obutto R3volution gaming cockpit will be the most difficult part about the whole gaming cockpit experience – especially if you are a gamer lacking a past history of building things with socket cap bolts and nuts. The whole assembly took me, solo, about four hours, and that included installing the three monitor mount and acrylic table tops. The Obutto R3volution arrives in two huge boxes (more if you get the accessories) and, once opened and laid out, the task ahead becomes very clear, if not a bit ominous. Just be sure you give yourself plenty of time for the assembly process and don’t rush or force anything. Most of the time you spend building the cockpit is actually just making sure you have it right before tightening everything down. To help you, Obutto has included a basic instruction sheet with the steps from individual pieces to fully-assembled gaming cockpit. I would not recommend a person without experience in this stuff to rely solely on the instruction sheet alone. What helped me to great extent were the instructional videos provided by Obutto. Those are available online at their official website.
Once completed, however, I felt like I could easily build another R3volution in half the time. Thankfully, I don’t have to. One thing that I can’t stress enough, and the instructional videos will warn you of this, is that the bolts and nuts are coated in a lubricant to avoid scratching the R3volution’s powder-coated frame as much as possible (remember, carbon steel can rust). Be sure to wipe and wash your hands before touching anything after working on the Obutto cockpit. Otherwise, you could ruin your couch, shirt, pants, tablecloth, etc.
In Practice
The good news about using the Obutto R3volution gaming cockpit is its benefits don’t stop at gaming. The inclusion of the keyboard tray and optional acrylic table tops means that it is perfectly usable as an office desk. Heck, the seat even reclines and you could even take a quick nap on the chair if you so desired. Obutto cockpits have always been known for their race car-inspired seating (it is an actual car seat, after all) and the R3volution is no different. The new seat while, admittedly still needing to be broken in, feels a lot more supportive and comfortable than the oZone’s. Playing your favorite racing or flight sim games on the Obutto R3volution takes them to a whole new level. The gaming cockpit is very sturdy and climbing into it gives you a moment of putting on your “game face” – allowing you to better focus on the race or sortie at hand. I logged several hours playing Eagle Dynamics DCS: A-10C Warthog as well as Codemasters DiRT 3 while sitting in the R3volution. To get even more immersion, I added a spare ButtKicker transducer to the seat frame, so everything rumbles when the bass level kicks up. In my time using the R3volution for both flight and racing sims, I can’t imagine ever going back to a regular office desk for gaming. Playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim while in the Obutto R3volution gaming cockpit was very comfortable and the optional triple monitor mount allowed me to optimize my monitor placement for just the right amount of peripheral vision to view the amazing world created by Bethesda Softworks.
When I asked Obutto’s head honcho and creator, Chris, about the design philosophy the company used in creating the R3volution, I got a very telling response:
That’s a good question Jerry, but since I’m not really a designer or engineer…lol…I more or less just approach it from how will this meet my own needs. This is pretty easy though since I’ve spent every day for the past 6 years in my cockpits, doing all my work and loads of gaming. With that said, the main idea all along was to create a cockpit that looked wicked and performed at least as good as the oZone (but, hopefully better, heh). Of course, not being a trained designer, it took a very long time fiddling around in Photoshop, sketching, cutting & welding steel, throwing stuff out, starting over, getting on the right path, and finally coming up with a prototype late at night, while FREEZING our asses off at our non-temp controlled factory in Hebei, around 1 year after starting…I can say without a doubt that I’m super pleased with how the r3v turned out, and hope heavy computer users & gamers all over the world get years of goodness out of their r3v’s!
Why this is so telling is in the passion that Chris and the rest of the Obutto team displays in inventing their creations. They are a company of people – of gamers, who were looking for the best gaming cockpit they would like to use and expanding on it from there. Obutto is a true success story and more people would benefit by following in their example.
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Wow… That looks pretty darn cool. I would use that for my PC games.
I wonder how it would work as a console game chair.
Pretty well! You could just move the monitor stand out of the way if you have it in front of a TV or mount the TV to the stand.