Morgan van Humbeck completed his shift in front of the television and passed out. Ten minutes later, his cell phone woke him. “Morgan, this is Teller,” said a small voice on the other end of the line. “Fuck off,” replied Morgan in disbelief. He hung up the phone and went back to sleep.
* * *
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.
Van Humbeck, unconscious on the couch, had just contributed to what was then a Desert Bus world record of five points.
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. 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.
“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.
The game remained a curious rumor until September, 2005, when Frank Cifaldi, a freelance American journalist and self-professed video-game historian, received a package in the mail. Cifaldi is the founder of Lost Levels, a Web site dedicated to the preservation of rare and obscure video games. “The site attracted the attention of some people who happened to have copies of unpublished games they didn’t know what to do with,” he explained. “One guy who used to review games for a magazine in the nineteen-nineties still had his review copy of Smoke and Mirrors.” Cifaldi posted a review and a copy of the game to a number of Internet forums. Desert Bus had been rediscovered.
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.”
Desert Bus for Hope was scheduled to begin late November, 2007, and Saunders built a simple Web site. “I initially called the Web site ‘The First Annual Desert Bus for Hope,’ but only because I thought it sounded funny,” he said. “We hadn’t thought about repeating the event at this point.” For every donation they received, the group pledged to drive a portion of the game’s route between Tucson and Las Vegas. They would film their progress and live stream it on the Internet. “The event itself was very cobbled together in the first year,” explained Stark. “The camera’s wide-angle lens was held on with rubber bands.” On the weekend of the event, Saunders and Stark set up the camera and a Sega CD system, and embarked on the first leg of the virtual journey.
* * *
“They didn’t contact us,” said Teller. “Someone sent me a news story about the event over e-mail. So I got in contact.” Saunders e-mailed Teller back, thanking him for his interest. He asked if Teller might consider giving the team an encouraging phone call to inspire what had become a “hub of sleep deprivation.” After Morgan van Humbeck hung up on him, Teller found another number to reach the team, and asked what they’d like for lunch. “They sent me the menu for a local Chinese restaurant,” said Teller. “I made the calls and had it all delivered.” Teller called back every day to buy the group lunch; he and Penn each donated five hundred dollars.
“That first year, we had no plans for food or scheduling,” said Stark. “If it hadn’t been for friends and family coming by with food, and to just hang out and keep us awake, I don’t think it would have succeeded.” The team managed to score five points in a hundred and eight hours of continuous play before a driver, in the fog of drowsiness, crashed the bus. “When we discussed our fundraising goal, we decided to aim for one thousand dollars,” said Stark. “But I lobbied to increase our goal to five thousand dollars, to give our viewers something crazy to reach for. We raised twenty-two thousand and eighty-five dollars that year.”
Desert Bus for Hope is now going into its seventh year, and has raised over a million dollars. “I liken it to AIDS walks,” said Teller. “When they first started, I think everyone was quite puzzled by them. Then people began to understand that performing a mundane task and having someone sponsor you is an interesting way to raise money.”
Nevertheless, both Saunders and Stark struggle to understand the game’s efficacy. “I have friends involved in worthwhile charities that struggle for every twenty-dollar donation,” said Saunders. “But Desert Bus for Hope seems to operate in this strange alternate universe where you can challenge strangers on the Internet to donate five thousand dollars in the next five minutes, and the money seems to just suddenly appear.” Teller said that at a recent magic show, “a guy came up to me and handed me a hundred-dollar bill and asked, ‘Would you get this to the guys that do Desert Bus?’ ”
The charity has become an institution of sorts in the gaming world, and the game is now available for ninety-nine cents on iOS and Android. “The game isn’t the challenge for us; it’s the excuse to keep us all trapped in a room for a week,” Stark explained. “It’s the horrible glue that binds the whole event together.”
“I’ve achieved a Zen-like state while playing it, where it doesn’t bother me as long as I don’t think about it,” Stark continued. “If I do think about it, it’s goddam awful.”
Saunders agreed, mournfully: “It is, without a doubt, the very worst video game I have ever played.”
