Chevy Silverado ZR2 Bison Goes Off-Road to Fetch 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.