RaceTime brings virtual reality games and escape rooms to McHenry: 'You forget about where you are'

Originally, Jim and Jen Rice planned to buy a bar.

When that fell through, the McHenry couple thought about a venue that their three boys — ages 10, 12 and 16 — could also be a part of and give them a place to hang out with their friends too.

An avid car racing enthusiast himself, Jim Rice also knows computers and had built virtual reality racing rigs before.

“Why don't we take a bunch of rigs and put them in a room?” was the original thought, Jim Rice said. “We got together as a family and talked about it, so that is how it started.”

After about three months of investigating, finding a location in McHenry, and building the racing rigs, the couple opened RaceTime VR Racing and Escape Rooms at 810 Front St. in McHenry on Labor Day. They have 10 racing rigs and can have up to seven different races — competing alone or against friends — at one time.

During their assembly, the rigs “were in my dining room,” Jen Rice said.

It was a building process too. Jim Rice found the bases from one company, added real car seats to those bases, built the computers operating them himself and tied all of the machines to a server that runs the race games.

“It was a lot of putting pieces together from different things,” he said.

There are two ways players can interact with the games. They can either play watching the screens like a traditional video-gaming experience, or they can put on the Meta Quest 2 VR gaming helmet for a complete virtual experience.

With the helmets on “you can see the detail, the interior of the car. It is more immersive,” Jim Rice said.

The VR headsets also are part of the virtual reality escape rooms. Rather than getting locked in a room, players don headsets and are given controllers to hold. The headsets transport players into an animated, computer-generated world.

Mike Coley of McHenry had just finished one of the escape room games with his sons, ages 9 and 10. Once the VR starts playing “it feels like you are actually in there. You forget about where you are, in this place,” Coley said. “I forgot anybody was here.”

The escape room part of the venue “is Jen's baby,” Jim Rice said.

The first time they demo'ed the games “it took us an hour and a half. We jumped in without reading the instructions, to see how it would be. It was so much fun — it was more fun that you think it might be,” Jen Rice said.

In the short time since it opened, the business has built a following.

Alexis Garcia, 20, purchased a membership and has been coming in to race a few times a week since the storefront venue opened.

“After school and work, I come here,” Garcia said.

Racing in one of the custom rigs is very different from playing on a gaming system at home, he said.

“Here, I can get feedback from the steering wheel, from the pedals,” Garcia said. “The quality of the TV is so much better, and you get feedback ... it is more interactive.”

The Rices also are trying to keep prices affordable “so kids can come and hang out. Seeing my 16-year-old here with his friends is awesome,” Jen Rice said.

“That is one of the reasons we did this. There are not a lot of fun things to do here for boys their ages,” she said.

While families are welcome, they do ask for children to be ages 10 and older, as smaller children do not always understand how to use the VR equipment.

As they are getting more people each weekend, they also suggest reserving spots and filling out forms via their website, racetimesim.com.