Canadian Trip Wrap Up

It has been almost two weeks now since the first element of our crew bound for Canada returned back to our offices in Prague. After we interviewed them internally about their trip, we thought it may be interesting to let you know what they got up to! We hope this will be a nice article providing you with more proof that our community is really the #BestCommunityEver!

Our trip to North America had multiple purposes. First of all, we were honored to be invited to participate at the Daimler Truck North America booth at one of the largest Canadian truck shows, the famous Truck World expo. It was a great pleasure for us to be able to have our small gaming station at the very center of the joint Freightliner Trucks and Western Star Trucks booth. Initially, our plans were to ship one of our 4D Motion Sims there, however, due to multiple logistic issues, mostly caused by heavy congestion in the ports of Hamburg and Montreal, our simulator never made it to the destination in time for the expo.

Our crew found a quick workaround to the problem, which they immediately executed by building a gaming station there from products readily available at local stores. On the shopping list was a gaming PC, a chair, a wheel stand with pedals, a big flat screen, and voila - an improvised gaming station was made. 

Not as fancy as our motion sim, but it still did the trick. Local visitors at the event were happy to be able to play our game, and our friends from Daimler Truck North America were satisfied with the result. What a save! A massive thanks to everyone from both the Western Star Trucks and Freightliner Trucks teams who helped us with all these unexpected issues, and who made our crew feel welcome. It was great to hear from the truck manufacturer representatives how much they love the ATS community! Check their messages for you here and here. BTW, we are already working on some new content for you together with DTNA, so stay tuned!

During the opening days of the show, we were lucky enough to meet with quite a lot of fans too. We enjoyed every minute of our long chats and deep discussion about pretty much everything with you, thanks for taking the time to stop by the booth!

However, meeting with the game fans was not the only reason for our presence at this exhibition. Our Industry Partnerships Manager Oscar was with us, too, and that means he was bouncing around, shaking hands, and having promising meetings with representatives from multiple truck OEMs. This may or may not bring some new content for our games in the future. No spoilers for now though!

The other big reason for our trip to Canada was related to our game on a deeper level. We've been lucky enough to get in touch with two amazing guys from our #BestCommunityEver, Daniel and Mark, who helped us by getting three different trucks with different engines, trailers, and mileage so our SFX guys could record truck sounds with them. Our friends really went the extra mile to help us make our games more realistic and we are very grateful and honored to have done these sound recording sessions with them. Mark, Dan, if you're reading this - thank you so much!

Both guys have a great life story too. It turns out that they found and developed their passion and love for trucking through our games! They went on to become professional truck drivers and even owner-operators (a trucker taking on jobs with their own truck) for many years now. It was really cool hanging out with them, chatting about the profession in general and how tough a truck driver's life can be. They provided us with a lot of insights about the automotive industry, trucking, road network, and traffic rules in not just Canada, but in the US as well, and we are going to pass all this along with contacts to them to our other departments for sure! We have prepared a short video for you all and you can check it out and hit the like on it below!

No matter the issues we had to deal with during our trip to Canada, we can say that all the reasons for our stay there, our presence at Truck World, our sound recording sessions, and our licensing talks were a big success and that we had a great time as well. All this would not have been possible without our great, awesome community! We really love you all!

If you're watching our social media channels closely, then you probably know a couple of guys from our crew actually haven't come back to Prague with us - they keep on going across the US. We'll be probably covering their journey here later. They still have some more tasks to do, meetings to attend, and ambient and truck sounds to record around a few places throughout the US. We wish them luck that everything goes smoothly and that they'll return back home safe and sound, with a lot of reference material gathered!