#Bus game driver

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. “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. “Every few years, video games are blamed in the media for all of the ills in society,” said Teller. During one of these rehearsals, the trio came up with the concept of a video game that could work as a satire against the anti-video-game lobby. Whenever Penn and Teller were booked to appear on the David Letterman show, a close friend, Eddie Gorodetsky, the Emmy Award–winning television writer whose credits include “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Two and a Half Men,” and “Saturday Night Live,” would visit their office and pretend to be Letterman to help them prepare. Van Humbeck, unconscious on the couch, had just contributed to what was then a Desert Bus world record of five points. 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.

The only scenery is the odd sand-pocked rock or road sign. The bus carries no virtual passengers to add human interest, and there is no traffic to negotiate. 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. 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. 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.

Bus game