Desert Bus 2008 – the inspirational dumbasses for our own special dumbasses

The guys who started all this – this blog with no purpose, let alone clearly defined mission statement – are a bunch of dumbasses.

And then there are those folks who inspired the guys.

In November 2008, back in the old wild west days of the internet, we found this website where these guys were streaming video of themselves playing a video game – they were driving a virtual bus through a never changing CGI landscape of pus-coloured sand and black tarmac. Eight hours of straight road, through this crappily rendered desert, for … charity? Yes. “Some people will do anything for money,” we said. And so began the collision and division of cells, the joyous process of our brains going tick-tick-tick-DING!

“I have an idea,” one of us said. The others promptly picked the idea up and ran away with it, and put out a hit on that first fellow. That first guy, well he’s buried out there in an unmarked grave, in that cemetery that Kate looks at all day long. She looks at it sometimes and smiles. He’s left a beautiful legacy behind.

Somehow we got into a bit of third person there.

So back to the guys – I mean, back to the folks driving a bus. It was called Desert Bus for Hope.

The game, Desert Bus (I just wrote Dessert Bus, Freudian slip, but what a happy world the place would be if there were more dessert buses, don’t you think?) was apparently invented by Penn and Teller. To me that smacks of urban myth – surely those guys weren’t smart or funny enough to invent such a challenging and hilarious game? Seriously, have you ever seen Penn and Teller?

The point of the game is to drive from Tuscon, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada, at 45 mph in real time. The road is perfectly straight. Because the bus veers slightly to the right, the player must constantly steer it. No sellotaping the button down and strolling off for a snack on the dessert bus.

Furthermore, if the bus runs off the road, it stalls and must be towed back to Tucson – also in real time. Then you get to start all over again.

If you make it to Las Vegas, you get one. whole. point.

Like what, are you going to make a website and sell each pixel for a $1 too?

We think the joke is supposed to be something about how it’s the most realistic video game in the world. You know, no sprays of blood and gore, no blue hedgehogs, no get-fifty-points-for-killing-all-the-hare-krishna. Maybe that joke would work, if there weren’t so few pixels, or there were passengers sicking up in the aisle, or you had kids distracting the driver with thrown food items, like on real buses. It’d actually be more realistic if you had to avoid the crazy guy with a knife inside the bus who wants to chop your head off and eat your dead body.

And these guys, they played this game for five days, five hours and five minutes. I dunno why they did it. Sure, they raised some money. Something piddly, like, seventy thousand dollars for, like, some sick kids or something.

Yeah, dumbasses, that’s what we thought. But we have to give them a little bit of respect for being geeks. Because geeks need more respect. That’s another post in itself. (What’s the difference between a geek and a nerd? asked one of our team’s girlfriends the other night. Nerds have money, came the reply.)

And if you ever want to do something as dumbass as play the worst video game in the world in order to raise money in order to give it away to sick kids – I suggest you don’t, because it’s been done before and you’d be a true fuckup dumbass to replicate it. Like what, are you going to make a website and sell each pixel for a $1 too? Come up with something more original and check out this place.