It doesn’t matter how old you get. Planting your butt into a faux NASA cockpit is bound to excite the senses and imagination of any who once put a checkmark next to “astronaut” when asked what they want to be when they grow up. Now, Xbox and Tempur have their own fake cockpit setup that’s giving select players the opportunity to rove around space with twin joystick controls. However, you’ll have to travel all the way to Germany (and eventually the U.K.) to plant your butt in the captain’s chair.
According to Tempur, the so-called “Dream Chair” is currently available to those visiting the Xbox booth at the Gamescom expo in Germany. The seat was designed by U.K.-based designer and artist Nicholas Alexander, and while the seat can swivel side to side, you can’t push it in toward the view screen akin to an in-game pilot you see in some of Starfield’s own promotional videos. Still, the cockpit includes all the random dials, switches, and blinking lights to give you the impression you’re manning a sophisticated starship.
Xbox’s Twitter account shared a quick video of the setup alongside an inspirational-sounding, if not intellectually devoid speech emphasizing the company’s connection to the memory foam first developed for NASA astronauts. Xbox and Bethesda have been trying to coin this “NASA-Punk” aesthetic, and while they’re certainly not first to the working man’s lo-fi, sci-fi style akin to Alien or The Expanse, you have to hand it to the designers for capturing the layman’s impression of a plausible cockpit. You just have to ignore all the Starfield and Tempur branding.
In a statement, Xbox global partnerships director Marcos Waltenberg called the setup a “modular cockpit” that “artfully mirrors Starfield gameplay to give players the feeling of truly captaining their own starship.”
The actual “Dream Chair” set up at the Xbox Gamescom booth includes a Tempur-branded cushion chair with two aluminum joysticks on each armrest. The large, cockpit-like apparatus sports a large, curved screen. The display isn’t giving users a full Starfield experience. Instead, it’s an “in-game flight through the universe of Starfield,” which apparently includes a small flying section that represents only a portion of the full game.
In a statement, Xbox global partnerships director Marcos Waltenberg called the setup a “modular cockpit” that “artfully mirrors Starfield gameplay to give players the feeling of truly captaining their own starship.”
You can’t buy the Dream Chair, but one lucky individual might eventually get their hands on it. After Gamescom, the Starfield setup will be displayed at the Saturn Xperion store in Cologne, Germany. It will eventually make its way to the Tempur store in Westfield, Stratford in the U.K. After that, it will be auctioned off in a charity raffle, but the company hasn’t offered any more details about how and when Bethesda fans can place their bid.