Desert Bus For Hope
In one of the most extraordinary tales of lost games, a group of philanthropic gamers are driving the Desert Bus across the arid planes to raise money for Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity. Desert Bus was included in Penn and Teller's unreleased Sega CD game Smoke & Mirrors, that was a collection of mini-games and the eponymous adventure portion. The title never saw the light of day, but with the advent of Lost Levels, it lived again.
Description of Desert Bus as posted on Lost Levels:
Players must drive a full-sized bus from Tucson, AZ to Las Vegas, NV, an incredibly boring drive through endless desert. The bus never goes over 45 mph, and it veers to the right ever so slightly, meaning that you can’t simply tape down buttons and walk away; if you do, the bus crashes, and a tow truck takes you back to the beginning, in real time. Oh, also, the trip takes eight hours. Eight real world hours of endless desert.
Sounds mind numbingly dull, huh? Yup, you bet. Canadian comedy group LoadingReadyRun is playing the game at DesertBus.org to raise money for Child's Play. The site is great. There is a live stream of the game as they play it, and separate stream of the person playing the game. You can join in on a live chat during the drive from a pop up window on the site, or hop in with an IRC client by joining the room #BusCam on chat1.ustream.tv .
So far they have raised over $12,000 and the numbers keep climbing. I'm not the best at conversion rates, but at $10,104.50 they would have to drive for 97 hours which comes to about 4.04 days straight. The more money they receive, the longer they have to drive. The support has been amazing so far with contributions from Penn & Teller, the creator of Desert Bus Eddie Gorodetsky, and such notable sites as Penny Arcade, Evil Avatar, Joystiq and Lost Levels. Please continue to support this great cause and donate what you can. You will be glad that you did.
Toots
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 26 November 2007
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: charity, child's play, desert bus, penn & teller smoke & mirrors, sega cd
Man, I love this game. I played through one trip (dma.sjsu.edu/~klee/desert_bus.php) and I have to hand it to these guys, this is the most grueling test of endurance anyone has ever done for charity.
Somebody has road trips on the brain. :)