Here’s our first look at The Mad Box

Further to news that Project CARS developer, Slightly Mad Studios, is developing its own console, The Mad Box, CEO Ian Bell has now shared images of how The Mad Box may look.

Bell offered several concepts over Twitter, although he acknowledged he’d "blurred the internals" as the team was "still in discussions".

https://twitter.com/bell_sms/status/1081166165743792128https://twitter.com/bell_sms/status/1081170180582006785https://twitter.com/bell_sms/status/1082036334015868929https://twitter.com/bell_sms/status/1082042550607736833

Bell believes the new console – designed to be a direct competitor to Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen consoles – will be "the most powerful ever built", adding "it’s literally ‘Mad’… You want 4k, you want VR at 60FPS? You want a full engine for free to develop your games on it? You have it."

Since the original news broke, Bell has also confirmed that The Mad Box is "going 90 per eye, 180 FPS internally", adding "my CTO has just called me and confirmed that’s what we’ll deliver". And while the developer will "open preorders when we have inventory", right now "it’s a way off, sorry".

While the twitter account is brand-new and Bell’s account has yet to be verified, in an email with Variety via an official Slightly Mad email address, Bell said the console had attracted the attention of "several interested parties" and has "multiple investors already offering the required funding for us to see the product to completion". That said, "it’s still early days" and Slightly Mad was looking "at the best offers right now" and "all that [it has] approached are discussing standard partial ownership investment deals".

Interestingly, Bell isn’t looking for vendors to sell the console, either. "It will be a worldwide console, and we’re already in early talks with areas that are, let’s say, not particularly open to other vendors at this moment," he said. Bell added the console will ship in "around three years time" and that "it will be a console as is the Xbox or Playstation". It will "support most major VR headsets and those upcoming and the specs will be equivalent to a ‘very fast PC 2 years from now".

Bell has also opened a competition to invite ideas for a slogan to use alongside The Mad Box’s marketing campaign after he was seemingly unhappy with the suggestion of ‘You’d be Mad to not buy the Box’ from a marketing company.

"I want to be clear about this," he tweeted. "The best slogan for the ‘Mad Box’ gets 10K and free games for life. This isn’t a joke. Hit me."

https://twitter.com/bell_sms/status/1081791507714125825

Finally, in a tweet only this morning, Bell hit back at claims Slightly Mad didn’t have the fiscal capacity to take on Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. "The investments we’re looking at are insane," he said. "Do you really think we would do this with less than hundreds of millions?"