Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Gamer, where the world of video games meets English luxury

The world of video games is all the rage, and has been for many years, especially with the globalisation and specialisation of esports, and that means it floods our lives in the most unexpected places. But what we didn’t expect was for even Rolls-Royce to succumb to it. Don’t worry, the brand hasn’t gone crazy, but one customer did turn to the personalisation programme to create a rather unusual Ghost.

This is the Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Gamer, a special order from a customer nostalgic for classic arcade video games, whose ideas for this creation were based on the world of 8-bits, which also marks the first creation of this kind for the brand’s craftspeople. As we will see below, it features very curious visible details inspired by these video games, but also others that the brand has hidden so that, in keeping with the main idea, travelling or discovering its interior becomes a game.

Let’s start with the exterior of the Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Gamer, where the brand has opted for a two-tone body, with the main part painted in Salamanca Blue while the upper section is painted in Crystal over Diamond Black, a super-metallic shade that pays homage to the neon tones of arcade games. Hand-painted on the bodywork is the nickname given to the car, “Cheeky Alien”, depicted as an alien and an explosion through a 8-bit design made up of 89 pixels of 3×3 mm. The exterior is completed by the backlit Pantheon grille, 22-inch forged wheels from the Black Badge pack and black brake calipers.

The interior of the Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Gamer, combining black with Cascade Tan, takes us on a small sensory and imaginative journey to the arcades of the late 1970s. The seats are decorated with custom-made 8-bit embroidery reading “Player 1” and “Player 2” on the front seats and, on the rear ones, “Player 3” and “Player 4”, in colours inspired by electric tones that contrast with the “Cheeky Alien” embroidered on the headrests.

The area between the rear seats, known as the Waterfall, is finished in Black Badge Technical Fibre upholstery and enhanced with another tribute to video games: two flying-saucer-shaped spaceships in a lunar scene set in space, hand-painted. The recreation of this scene alone required more than two weeks of intense work to achieve the desired tones and make them fit perfectly, and then to paint them entirely by hand using a combination of traditional brushwork, a specialised sponge technique to create texture and depth, and subtle airbrush blending. Rolls-Royce has also taken care to hide “Cheeky Alien” motifs throughout the interior, such as on the rear table or on the hidden side of the front chrome-black vent.

This creation is, as it could not be otherwise, finished with the Starlight roof, which will inevitably remind those of us who are starting to go grey, and those who already are, of spaceship games. It includes an bomber formed by 85 LEDs, while some other LEDs have been repositioned to give the impression that the ship is cutting through space, accompanied by other 85 ships whose LEDs were placed by hand, one by one. All of this is rounded off by the Shooting Star function, reprogrammed to simulate laser fire and beams of light from the ships projected across the roof. Finally, using the same 8-bit typeface, messages typical of arcade machines can be read on the door sills, such as “Insert Coin”, “Press Start”, “Loading…” or “Level Up”.