How a Coffee Machine Joke Turned Into Xbox Rage Racer Driving Is Hard
Elegant Horse Studios co-founder Laurynas Jatužis tells the story of how a half-baked office idea became a Foddian bathtub racing game now out on Xbox. The journey involved one sleepless weekend, a terrible mouse control prototype, and a co-founder who cannot let an idea die.
The Coffee Machine That Started It All
Not every great game begins with a design document or a Kickstarter pitch. Sometimes it starts with a bad joke next to a coffee machine, and a co-founder who is, in the words of his teammate, physically incapable of letting an idea go untested.
That is essentially the origin story of Driving Is Hard, the new Foddian rage racer from Elegant Horse Studios, now out on Xbox with Xbox Play Anywhere support. Writing on Xbox Wire, lead artist and co-founder Laurynas Jatužis laid out how the whole thing came to be, and it is a pretty good reminder that the silliest ideas sometimes have the most stubborn staying power.
At the time, Jatužis and his co-founder Liudas, who goes by Hangeris, were still working corporate day jobs while quietly building toward their own indie studio. Their third co-founder, Tautvydas, was already part of the team, though he worked at a different company and was not present for what Jatužis describes as the chaos brewing around that office coffee machine.
”You Know What the World Doesn’t Have?”
The conversation that sparked everything was pretty ordinary by game dev standards. A group of coworkers were loitering around the coffee machine, tossing out half-formed game concepts, as people in the industry tend to do. Someone brought up Chained Together and the broader Foddian genre, those gloriously punishing games engineered specifically to make you want to throw your controller.
That is when Hangeris had his moment. According to Jatužis, he said: “You know what the world doesn’t have? A standalone Foddian racing game.” Then, for maximum chaos, he tacked on: “And you’d control the car using only a mouse.”
Everyone laughed. Everyone moved on. Everyone except Hangeris.
He went home after work, according to Jatužis, and spent a sleepless, hyper-caffeinated weekend building a prototype. He sent the build to the rest of the team. They played it. And it was, by Jatužis’s own account, awful. Steering a car with nothing but a mouse turned out to be unintuitive, infuriating, and not in the fun way that Foddian games are supposed to be.
From Terrible Prototype to Bathtub on Wheels
What is remarkable about that origin story is not the terrible prototype. Bad prototypes are basically a rite of passage. What matters is that the team saw something worth salvaging in the mess, and kept pulling at the thread until the game underneath it started to emerge.
The finished version of Driving Is Hard asks players to pilot a bathtub on wheels across brutally steep off-road terrain. That framing alone says a lot about how the concept evolved from “mouse-controlled car” into something with a distinct personality. The bathtub is not just a visual gag. It sets the tone for the whole experience: absurd, punishing, and completely committed to its own internal logic.
Foddian games live or die by how they manage frustration. The genre, which includes titles like Chained Together, works best when the difficulty feels fair in retrospect even when it feels completely unfair in the moment. Players have to believe the game is possible even as it is actively humiliating them. Getting that balance right is genuinely hard, which makes the genre a risky bet for a small indie team.
Elegant Horse Studios and the Bigger Picture
Elegant Horse Studios was still in the process of becoming a real studio when Driving Is Hard started taking shape. Jatužis notes that he and Hangeris were working full-time corporate jobs at the time, with the indie dream still more aspiration than reality. Tautvydas was already involved, having worked with the team on Sheep Sweep, though he was at a separate company and missed the original coffee machine conversation entirely.
The fact that a game born from a throwaway office joke made it through development, found a home on Xbox, and ships with Xbox Play Anywhere support is the kind of thing that tends to get lost in the polished marketing language around game releases. Jatužis’s account strips that away. The prototype was bad. The idea was ridiculous. And they made the game anyway.
For anyone who has ever laughed off their own half-baked idea and wondered what would have happened if they had just gone home and built the thing, Driving Is Hard is a pretty direct answer.
What is Driving Is Hard?
Driving Is Hard is a Foddian-style rage game from Elegant Horse Studios where players pilot a bathtub on wheels across brutally steep off-road hills. It is out now on Xbox with Xbox Play Anywhere support.
Who made Driving Is Hard?
The game was made by Elegant Horse Studios, co-founded by Laurynas Jatužis, Liudas (known as Hangeris), and Tautvydas. The three were previously working on a game called Sheep Sweep.
What is a Foddian game?
Foddian games are a genre of brutally punishing titles designed to make players rage. Games like Chained Together fall into this category. The term refers to games built around high difficulty and deliberate frustration.
How did Driving Is Hard start?
According to co-founder Laurynas Jatužis writing on Xbox Wire, the concept came from a casual conversation around an office coffee machine. Co-founder Hangeris proposed a standalone Foddian racing game controlled only with a mouse, went home, and had a prototype finished after one sleepless weekend.