I have no doubt that some people find video games boring, I
also have no doubt that if I were to describe the game ‘Desert Bus’ everyone
would find this game boring; unless you have been keeping up to date with the
nerdy happenings of the last week of course
I have no doubt that some people find video games boring, I also have no doubt that if I were to describe the game ‘Desert Bus’ everyone would find this game boring; unless you have been keeping up to date with the nerdy happenings of the last week of course.
Desert Bus is a featured mini game from an unreleased mini game collection created in 1995; the objective of the game is to drive a bus in a desert, to be more precise you drive from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. Pretty boring right? Well you should probably know that the drive is in real time and the bus travels at a maximum of 45mph meaning that the drive takes around eight hours to complete (there is no pause button, of course). Don’t even think about taping a button down because the bus very slowly veers to the right meaning the driver has to steer left every few seconds, if you don’t then prepare to crash and be towed back to your last location in real time.
So that’s Desert Bus, you get a point every eight hours providing you don’t crash and the only visual change is a bug splat every five hours. Where could I possibly be going with this? Well in the past week a group of gamers set out in the third annual ‘Desert Bus for Hope’, where they play the game on a live webcam for as long as donations come in, while auctioning off items and performing songs and movie scenes from geek culture with all money going to charity. This may not sound all too impressive and perhaps even a bit of a copout considering what other people do for charity, but after playing the game (on a rotating shift) for five days and sixteen hours this group of friends managed to raise $132,107.94 for .
I find this feat absolutely amazing, gamers are not the most popular sub culture group and can often get some pretty bad press; so it can give you such a good feeling when a group of people do something like this and a host of people respond with such a massive amount of donations. As sickening as it sounds, it is kind of heart warming, while watching the live feed I managed to catch them singing their own rendition of the Red Dwarf theme song for a $20 donation. Seeing this group of nerds sing for charity (while one of them nudged a crawling bus to the left on a Sega C.D.) was, in a very weird way, oddly beautiful.
So go check out the website for and perhaps even get ready to donate for next year’s game, until then keep in mind that despite the stream of swearing travelling from our mouths to our screens, gamers aren’t all that bad.
Daniel Rowbotham