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“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.” “I heard about Desert Bus in early 2006, on a Web site called ,” said Saunders. Van Humbeck is a former member of LoadingReadyRun, an Internet sketch-comedy group founded by Graham Stark and Paul Saunders in 2003. “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. “The site attracted the attention of some people who happened to have copies of unpublished games they didn’t know what to do with,” he explained. Cifaldi is the founder of Lost Levels, a Web site dedicated to the preservation of rare and obscure video games. 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. 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. “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. “But by the time the game was finished, the format was dead,” said Teller. 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. 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. Attorney General at the time, Janet Reno, was a critic of on-screen violence.) 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. “It’s a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious.
“The route between Las Vegas and Phoenix is long,” said Teller.
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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.