Somewhere near Box Park, just off Dingwall Road, there was a roundabout. Croydon Council then turned it into a one-way road. Dylan Rowley, who models the buses, the scenery, and the map for Croydon: London Bus Simulator, rebuilt the junction from scratch, reconstructing the roundabout exactly as it was in 2025 purely for the benefit of thousands of gamers who will never drive it in real life.
Two weeks after the update was pushed, the council changed it again.
“It’s become a running joke that whenever I build something, the council goes out of its way to change it right after,” chuckles Dylan.
It’s a small anecdote, but it’s perfectly illustrative of what the team at Centro Interactive is doing – building a simulation game that needs to be updated based on UK local government decisions. It makes me scrunch my face even while typing it.
The name does a lot of the heavy lifting – and is the reason I was drawn to it in the first place. Say “Croydon” to most people outside of South London, and you’ll probably get a grimace and a quip about knife crime. My personal memories are overridingly big blocks of concrete, and Watford beating Crystal Palace.
So when I was told there’s a “hyper-realistic Roblox bus simulator set in Croydon,” I was suitably flummoxed. The reputation that comes with the borough has, understandably, generated conversation about the game. Toby, the game’s product designer, tells me: “We’ve definitely seen TikToks and social posts of people reacting to it being Croydon, because it’s iconic enough that people are shocked by it.
“I feel like if it were somewhere with less of a reputation, it wouldn’t get that reaction,” he continues. It’s easy to assume that there’s a joke in here somewhere – that a studio dedicated to building a ‘realistic’ simulator around Croydon is just a giant piss-take, but trust me, it’s quite the opposite.
“It’s become a running joke that whenever I build something, the council goes out of its way to change it right after,”
Don’t miss a millimeter
Since launching in December 2021, the game has been played more than 50 million times on Roblox. The map, built entirely by the small team at Centro Interactive, is a 1:1 recreation of the borough and surrounding suburbs. Enthusiasts will find Norwood Junction, Elmers End, Thornton Heath, Mitcham Common, and plenty more. The sheer attention to detail paid by the team has produced a fanbase that argues about the game with the verve normally reserved for daytime radio phone-ins.
“We’ve had complaints about stickers being millimeters off,” says Dylan. “On one of our new electric buses, we had to add LED screens with visible individual pixels – that’s the sort of thing they go mad over.”
When I ask Toby for the most ridiculous complaint they’ve received as developers, he pauses and tells me there are hundreds. “There are loads of variants of buses,” he explains, “there’ll be a bus, but then thirty different sub-variants that people get confused between.”
“There’ll be full arguments over whether there’s a seat there, or there isn’t a seat there. Whether a bolt is correct, or it’s not there. Whether a vent is there, or it’s not,” he continues.
I’m not sure I’d want to cross a Croydon bus enthusiast having a bad day, as Dylan recalls a particular situation. A hybrid bus in the game was updated to reflect a real-world refurbishment. He spent hours designing and implementing the new seat fronts and backs, but the community reacted angrily. “People were adamant for about two hours that all the seats were wrong, because they didn’t know that the refurbished version existed,” he says.
It took two hours for the fans to be talked down, and accept that this version of the bus did actually exist. But again, it shows just how seriously people take their Croydon buses.
Dylan’s summed up the fanbase eloquently: “You get the bus enthusiasts complaining about the buses, the Croydon enthusiasts complaining about Croydon, and then the Croydon bus enthusiasts complaining about everything.”
Best of both Croydons
I pondered why Croydon actually worked as a place, beyond having somewhat of a reputation that automatically draws people to it. It turns out that as a real place, Croydon is a cracking subject for this kind of 1:1 simulation building.
“It’s got the 60s council estate, the town centre, the countryside between Central Croydon and New Addington, which you just wouldn’t get in Central London,” Dylan tells me after I daftly asked why not just do it in Central. “And the roads are a lot faster, which the enthusiast base likes – they like their fast roads.”
Toby adds: “There are tons of areas around it that draw resemblance to places that are nearby. Because it’s based on a real map, it has the feel of a real environment, but at the same time, it can also be related back to places close to where players live themselves.”
“You get the bus enthusiasts complaining about the buses, the Croydon enthusiasts complaining about Croydon, and then the Croydon bus enthusiasts complaining about everything.”
Realism, however, is not the only thing that the team aims for. Dylan recounts a story near a large supermarket in Beddington. A difficult old junction was recently replaced by the council with a new roundabout – and rather than picking one version to model, Dylan used creative license to combine them. “I merged the parts that worked from both, and people are generally happy with that approach, which gives the best of both Croydons,” he says. I can’t help but think Croydon council will be taking notes again.
Equally, when bus routes are discontinued or shortened, players ask whether the game will follow suit. It won’t. “We don’t remove content – if people like that nostalgia, we should allow it. There’s no point in removing content,” says Toby. The result is a Roblox world where Croydon is almost being preserved, and edited, including versions of the borough that no longer exist in reality.
Image Credit: Croydon: London Bus Simulator Wiki
An unlikely pilgrimage
What’s stranger still is how it’s not just people from UK, or South London that have fallen in love. The game’s active community includes players logging on from Finland, France, and America to name a few – a strange global reach for a simulator built around one South London borough. Some of them have gone further than logging on. “They already have,” Toby tells me, when I ask if international fans ever make the actual trip. “People have come over because of the game, amazed to find themselves in real Croydon.”
“You should get some money from the tourism board,” I say. Is there even a tourism authority for Croydon? “Probably not,” Toby laughs. “No, there wasn’t,” Dylan adds. “Maybe that’s your next venture.”
“People have come over because of the game, amazed to find themselves in real Croydon.”
Built to be argued with
With anything built around a core of hardcore enthusiasts, engaging and taking feedback from the community is vitally important. Centro has structured it into the way they work: player suggestions for new buses, routes, or features go into a suggestion box, are categorized and surface publicly on a leaderboard. “There’s also an element of creative vision for the game: things we as developers think would be great, that players might not explicitly suggest, but where we take the sentiment of what they’re saying, and try to solve problems they might be having,” explains Toby.
In the deepest darkest corners of the bus-enthusiast Roblox world, Centro runs moderated simulation lobbies where players submit clips of bad driving from others. The guidelines aren’t just ‘drive nicely’ but Toby tells me “we actually refer to the Highway Code as part of it.” It makes more sense, as I learn the two young developers both come from a transport background – and are transport enthusiasts first and foremost.
For all its complexity, realism and seriousness, none of that is allowed to become a barrier for someone who wants to just get in and press play. Toby’s blunt about the line between realism and playability: “If you can get a player from clicking play on Roblox, to actually driving in 30 seconds, that’s a win – you don’t want to impede that process. Anything that means you’re sitting around and not moving, is the line.” While those in pursuit of absolute realism have suggested walking into a depot, fiddling with buttons in sequence to get the bus going, this is a line that the devs haven’t crossed. The barrier to entry is deliberately low, with the hardcore detail layered wonderfully on top.
My chat with Centro has certainly opened my eyes; obsessive depth with low barrier to entry was not my preconception of a typical audience that you’d find on Roblox. Roblox’s audience skews young, mobile, and tablet-first, but Centro’s skews older, console and PC-based, with players well into their twenties and thirties. “There are people I remember being around when I was younger on the platform who are bus drivers now in real life, and they’re still playing the game,” says Dylan. “We’ve known them for seven or eight years, and they’re still playing a bus simulator even though they drive real buses.”
In a world full of doom and gloom, release and happiness are all-important (see my interview with Two Point Studios). Toby reveals they’ve received some touching messages too about how Croydon has helped people mentally. “I think escapism is important, and it’s reassuring that what we’re doing is what people after,” he tells me.
Not the place you think it is
I close our interview at Ukie’s For One Night Only showcase by asking what they’d want a first-time player to take away after an hour of playing the game. Dylan exclaims, “I’d probably say that being a bus driver is quite hard – if you can get around without crashing into something, you’re doing well.”
Both gentlemen land in West Croydon, too, as the place that most people ‘fall in love’ with once they’ve spent a while in the game. “There’s more to it than just the city centre, there are actual bits of countryside,” says Toby.
“It’s not anything big or exciting, but it’s not the dangerous place it’s made out to be in the media. It’s genuinely a cool place, worth visiting if you have any interest in Croydon,” ends Dylan.
Back in the council office, I imagine they’re thinking of just what to do with that junction in Beddington that Dylan spent so long obsessing over…
Authored by
Ollie Ring
Ollie has worked across video games, esports, and gambling for more than ten years, including consultancy work in the gambling industry. His bylines include BBC, Red Bull Gaming, Esports Insider, CasinoBeats, PC Gamer, Green Man Gaming, and Esprouts, his Substack on the overlap between games and gambling. Whereas he once enjoyed the chaos of PvP and running six WoW Classic accounts to min-max every aspect of his gaming life, Ollie now enjoys a tycoon or management game with far less pressure (and people) involved.
