Don't know what your kids are doing on Roblox? They're probably playing Croydon: London Bus Simulator

There are few sentences guaranteed to make a parent’s eyebrows raise like: “I’m going on Roblox.”

For years, the platform has occupied that seemingly unknowable corner of the internet where children go to play games, make friends and generally spend an amount of time online that you’re fairly sure can’t be healthy. And the concerns aren’t exactly imaginary. Roblox has faced sustained scrutiny over child safety, prompting interventions from regulators including the UK’s Ofcom, while the company has introduced increasingly stringent age checks, account types and communication restrictions.

So if you’re a parent wondering what, exactly, your child is getting up to on Roblox, you could be forgiven for imagining something sinister.

A bus-spotting success

The game has become a considerable success. For the uninitiated, Roblox, rather than being a single game, is made up of thousands of games built on a core platform, predominately created by its userbase, with some breakout developers turning their titles into full blown business operations. Count among them Centro, the small team behind Croydon: London Bus Simulator.

It has attracted tens of millions of visits and, according to its developers, has at times pulled in up to 90,000 daily users. Its current Roblox listing describes a vast map, hundreds of buses, realistic physics, multiplayer “Shifts”, Simulation Servers and the ability to create and grow your own bus company.

We get asked ‘Did you learn specific game development courses or did you do it through Roblox?’ Roblox has taught us everything we know.
Toby Johnson, Centro

Part of that success comes down to accessibility, says Toby Johnson, the 21 year old Product Designer at developer Centro.

“Roblox runs on pretty much anything that’s connected to the internet nowadays. I think even the latest edition runs on smart TVs,” he explains.

“I think the fact that you can open an app on pretty much any device, click play and within 30 seconds you're playing. There's no friction that might come with a standalone game. You can download it to more than one device. It's very snappy. Roblox has its own multiplayer servers — that's great for us — and also deals with all the monetisation and moderation. So we don't have to focus resources on those areas. We can just be game developers and make a game.”

It’s an efficient money-maker too, he continues:

“Roblox is weird — I heard someone say this a few weeks ago: Roblox is the only platform where you can make a game, and every time it will turn a profit because there's no running costs. Even if you have a quiet month, you might not make as much, but you're never making a loss.”

In fact, Roblox has been key to the team's formation. Toby and lead programmer Dylan Rowley (responsible for “the enthusiast nerdy stuff”) found each other through playing a Roblox game that was part of the inspiration for Croydon: London Bus Simulator — Mind the Gap, by Alex Berry.

“Roblox has certainly been the platform that's nurtured us all the way through,” says Toby. “We get asked, ‘Did you learn specific game development courses or did you do it through Roblox?’ Roblox has taught us everything we know.”

Despite the meme-worthy title, the game’s appeal is considerably more sophisticated than ‘drive bus, lol’.

You choose a vehicle, select a route, operate the doors, pick up passengers, follow the roads and attempt to maintain a service. There are interactive ticket machines, realistic sounds, working accessibility features and a sprawling network of routes. Players can join organised services, operate alongside other drivers and even create their own bus companies, complete with custom liveries, interiors and routes.

There are also trams. There are night buses. There are bus-spotting sessions. Yes, in what might be the most heartwarmingly quaint gaming trend of 2026, people genuinely go bus spotting in a video game about buses.

Croydon Roblox BUS SPOTTING 4K | Norwood Junction Station | Sim Server 1 - YouTube

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“With Croydon[‘s playerbase], if they're not outside, the chances are that's what they're doing for their entire spare time,” jokes Dylan.

“Some people, certainly in the winter months, spotting is their way of socialising,” adds Toby.

“I think it's just a new way for people to get to know people in niches. It's great.”

The Croydon factor

It sounds ridiculous until you realise that this is exactly the sort of mundane detail that makes the game so appealing. Croydon is not being presented as some fantastical gaming environment. It is being recreated as a place where ordinary things happen: buses arrive late, passengers get on, someone misses their stop and you spend 30 minutes driving across South London.

And that brings us to the game's inspired choice of setting.

Because if you were going to build a lovingly detailed simulation of London, you probably wouldn't immediately choose Croydon. London has plenty of glamorous candidates. Westminster. Camden. Shoreditch. Notting Hill. Greenwich. The sort of places that come with ready-made cinematic appeal.

Croydon? Less so.

“You know, we've had clips of our game go viral on social media and all the comments have been like, ‘Oh, it's not realistic. It hasn't got this. It hasn't got that, it's not got some guy just on the street yelling at you!’” says Toby.

“And these [comments were from] all local people. People also saying, ‘Oh my god, that's my local bus stop.’”

The borough has spent decades being used as shorthand for urban dreariness, crime and general metropolitan disappointment. Even Croydon councillors have previously acknowledged that it has been the “butt of jokes for a very long time now”, while attempting to remind outsiders that there is, in fact, loads to love about the place.

That reputation is, of course, rather unfair.

“I think there's definitely a reputation to Croydon,” nods Toby, “But I think it's a lovable one. It's an amicable one. We love it.”

Croydon is one of South London’s biggest commercial centres, with a huge population, major transport connections, a long musical and cultural history (in part thanks to housing The BRIT School) and something genuinely useful for a bus simulator: lots of buses.

It is also unusually varied. You can go from dense town-centre streets to residential neighbourhoods, railway interchanges and greener stretches of South London without leaving the game's world. West Croydon, Elmers End, Thornton Heath and Norwood Junction all become part of the playground.

“I'd never been to Croydon before starting this,” reveals Dylan.

“I was sort of going in blind, and I do like learning about new places. I didn't realise how close everything was together — you’ve got such a good selection of routes, a good selection of scenery, all in a small place. When I think of London, I think of those 1930s terrace houses. But Croydon has got a huge variety of housing types. It's got loads of interesting building types. I didn't realise there was a huge, really nice looking library in the centre until I was working on it.

“There's even industrial estates — maybe not people's favourite areas,” adds Dylan. “But the variety is there within a small range.”

And to both the benefit and frustration of the team, Croydon is never standing still.

“I think Dylan also thinks Croydon council is winding him up because every time he builds something, they change it!” jokes Toby.

“They change the road layouts, and it's like ‘you've got to remake it!’ They've got rid of the underpass, and they've changed the roundabout on Dingwall so many times. Like, stop it!”

Everyday excitement

And perhaps that's the secret: Croydon is interesting precisely because it’s so normal.

The game turns the everyday into the extraordinary. A bus route becomes a shared adventure. A bus interchange becomes a social hub. A rainy-looking South London high street becomes somewhere worth exploring because you've got a virtual timetable to stick to.

It is a particularly British form of escapism: escaping reality by meticulously recreating it, like the Airfix model makers of old.

Bus drivers actually play the game. They message and say ‘I'm a bus driver at this depot. I really love your game. I play it after work’. It’s literally the busman's holiday.
Toby Johnson, Centro

“People like to experience something that resembles what they see when they walk out of their house,” reckons Toby.

“You go from a cityscape to suburbs to countryside within a very small distance, which means that you can create routes which resemble those that maybe you're familiar with in your own life or in your own area.”

But it’s also, crucially, a very social game.

“It's a very social experience in the sense that you see other players driving,” says Toby of the game’s key strength.

“In standard play you can just drive through other buses, there's no collisions. You just go through them. But there is a simulation server which has a paywall, and it's moderated as well. People submit clips of other people driving badly, and then you get suspended — people crash into people, and yeah, people love that shared experience.”

Toby and Dylan began developing Croydon: London Bus Simulator when they were teenagers, with Toby choosing development over university. What started as an extremely niche idea has grown into a game with tens of millions of visits, an enthusiastic community and enough depth to attract important fans — the team are regularly contacted by Croydon’s actual bus drivers, who praise the attention to detail (and point out room for improvement, naturally).

“Bus drivers actually play the game,” stresses Toby. “They message and say ‘I'm a bus driver at this depot. I really love your game. I play it after work’. It’s literally the busman's holiday. They love it.”

That might be the most charming thing about Croydon: London Bus Simulator. In an era when we're increasingly anxious about what children are doing online, here is a Roblox game whose greatest achievement is making the most ordinary aspects of British life feel, if not exciting, then certainly engaging.

“I joined Roblox when I was six!” says Toby.

“I'm 21 now. I used to be that younger audience, but it has grown.”

“Because of that core 15 - 17 audience age range, there are those who then go and become bus drivers or bus mechanics. People can find their niche, find their people who will then help each other to get into the industry. It's one of the only communities that I know of that is really nurturing, to get people into their love of the bus industry.”

Your kid might be chatting to strangers online, of course. They might be spending too much time staring at a screen. The wider concerns around Roblox and child safety are real and shouldn't be dismissed simply because one game happens to be wholesome.

But if you peek over their shoulder and discover they're carefully pulling a virtual double-decker into a bus stop in Croydon, following a timetable and saving up for a better bus, perhaps you can relax for a moment.

So what next for Croydon: London Bus Simulator? The team would be open to a TFL collaboration “if they approached us”, but there’s been no contact thus far. And “map-wise, we have actually reached the limit of what Roblox can do,” says Toby.

“But!” he continues, “That means splitting the game into different servers, like a portal where you transition players into a different path. That should hopefully allow us to just rapidly expand.

“I mean, you should see how fast Dylan can make maps. It's incredible, he's churning out streets in minutes.”

And Dylan might have his most fiendish route yet to conquer:

“There’s one route called 464. It goes from New Addington to Tatsfield, and it goes down this narrow roadway that can only physically fit one bus at a time. I know it's going to be absolute chaos.”

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Gerald Lynch is the Editor-in-Chief of Shortlist, keeping careful watch over the site's editorial output and social channels. He's happiest in the front row of a gig for a band you've never heard of, watching 70mm cinema re-runs of classic sci-fi flicks, or propping up a bar with an old fashioned in one hand and a Game Boy in the other.