Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created

The drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, takes approximately eight hours when travelling in a vehicle whose top speed is forty-five miles per hour. In Desert Bus, an unreleased video game from 1995 conceived by the American illusionists and entertainers Penn Jillette and Teller, players must complete that journey in real time. Finishing a single leg of the trip requires considerable stamina and concentration in the face of arch boredom: the vehicle constantly lists to the right, so players cannot take their hands off the virtual wheel; swerving from the road will cause the bus’s engine to stall, forcing the player to be towed back to the beginning. The game cannot be paused. The bus carries no virtual passengers to add human interest, and there is no traffic to negotiate. The only scenery is the odd sand-pocked rock or road sign. Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities, making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in gaming. (...)

“Every few years, video games are blamed in the media for all of the ills in society,” said Teller. “In the early nineteen-nineties, I wrote an article for the New York Times citing all the studies that show video games have no effect on a child’s morals. But we wanted to create some entertainment that helped make the point.” The conversation with Gorodetsky seeded the idea of a video game that casts the player as a bus driver in a rote simulation. “The route between Las Vegas and Phoenix is long,” said Teller. “It’s a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious. That was one of the big keys—we would make no cheats about time, so people like the Attorney General could get a good idea of how valuable and worthwhile a game that just reflects reality would be.” (The U.S. Attorney General at the time, Janet Reno, was a critic of on-screen violence.)

The New Jersey–based video-game developer Imagineering created Desert Bus as one component of a larger game collection, called Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, for the Sega CD, a short-lived add-on for the Sega Genesis console. Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player that scored a hundred points, a feat that would require eight hundred continuous hours of play: a real-life trip from Tucson to Las Vegas on a desert bus carrying showgirls and a live band.

“But by the time the game was finished, the format was dead,” said Teller. “We were unable to find anybody interested in acquiring the game.” Imagineering went out of business, and Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors was never released. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995. (...)

Van Humbeck is a former member of LoadingReadyRun, an Internet sketch-comedy group founded by Graham Stark and Paul Saunders in 2003. “I heard about Desert Bus in early 2006, on a Web site called waxy.org,” said Saunders. “The blog post linked to an extensive description of the main game, as well as the various mini-games included on the disc—and, most importantly, it had a torrent of the entire game available for download.”

Saunders wanted to film the group as it attempted to complete Desert Bus for a sketch. “At this same time,” he said, “one of the other team members, James Turner, brought up the idea of using our minor Internet fame to do something to benefit Child’s Play,” a charity that donates video games and consoles to children’s wards in hospitals around the world. “His idea was a live competition event where we would take pledges depending on how far we made it in various video games. We decided to combine both ideas and play Desert Bus for charity.”

by Simon Parkin, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited