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community weblog
It's still the most Desert Bus-iest time of the year!
20 years on, a non-profit society in Victoria, BC has been raising money by playing the worst video game ever. As blessed by the mods, I'm pleased to inform you that this year is the 20th annual running of the Internet's first livestreaming charity video game telethon called Desert Bus for Hope. There's just so much to say, but I wrote about it 10 years ago, and there's actually a very good 45 minute introduction that explains what this is all about, including its own Canadian Heritage minute.
I mean, there's a whole lot of information that's been archived by the Video Strike Team, so you can catch up on what you missed in the 10 years since I made my other post.
Previously.
posted by TrishaLynn on Oct 23, 2026 at 8:00 PM
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Yes! It's back! I was just telling a friend about it the other day.
Desert Bus is a mini-game from the never-released Sega CD game Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. Challenging the player to drive a listing, unreliable, virtual bus on an endless, eight-hour-long strip of highway between Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, it is widely regarded to be the worst video game ever made.
It plays out in real-time, there are no cheat codes, and the bus has front-end alignment issues, and pulls to the left the entire time. No chance of walk away and coming back in 2 hours.
Honestly, the best of humanity. Sending money now.
posted by Silvery Fish at 9:18 PM
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Challenging the player to drive a listing, unreliable, virtual bus on an endless, eight-hour-long strip of highway between Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada
That's not the whole story. When you reach Vegas you score one point. Then you have to drive back to Tucson, now by headlights in the dark, another unpausable eight hours. The highest score achieved by a player is believed to be 14.
it is widely regarded to be the worst video game ever made
I couldn't disagree more. Desert Bus is fascinating.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:37 PM
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Ah nice! A coworker of mine is travelling to the island to do this. I'd heard about this before but somehow failed to notice it was a B.C. thing.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:36 PM
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I've been watching/listening to this every year for maybe 15 years, I mark it on my calendar! What a wonderful thing.
posted by fridgebuzz at 12:39 AM
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I honestly think it's a great game. I mean, it's absolutely no fun, but the depths of its non-funness are such that it achieves greatness.
posted by Kattullus at 4:11 AM
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Games streamer LobosJr has been playing DB as part of his annual raiser for St Jude for a while as well. He's noted that the drift regularly changes so you cannot just provide a steady input and unmind the road.
posted by telepsism at 4:17 AM
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> it is widely regarded to be the worst video game ever made
> I couldn't disagree more. Desert Bus is fascinating.
I don't think you can be fair to the original intention of the game without acknowledging that it's terrible. It's meant to be terrible. It ended up being so terrible that it transcends. The original point of Desert Bus was to troll players into an endurance game, the highest-scoring player getting a chance to win a real ride on a bus with Penn and Teller from Tuscon to Vegas. It's the home-game counterpart to keeping your hand on a truck for longer than anyone else, or eating bugs on TV. Desert Bus is part of an anthology pack of games that troll its players -- other games can be clandestinely configured to give one player an advantage, or have an NPC opponent with 100% insta-kill power.
posted by at by at 4:56 AM
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Yeah, Desert Bus is miserable to play but it absolutely succeeds at its artistic goals. I think 'worst game ever made' is kind of a tricky one, because a game can be so unplayable that it's simply hard to engage with, like Superman 64 or Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing.
For my money, the title has to go to The Guy Game, which was a badly-implemented trivia game where the prize was increasingly less censorship on the footage of topless women. Already morally dubious enough on top of not being fun, but it crosses the line into actual crime, because one of the models was underage.
posted by Merus at 5:47 AM
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Metafilter: it ended up being so terrible that it transcends.
posted by Silvery Fish at 6:55 AM
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This is a hilarious way to find out friends have moved to Victoria. (We held it in Vancouver for the first ten years! I lost touch with folks when I moved away.)
posted by foxtongue at 9:15 AM
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Last spring this guy named Chad Caruso skateboarded across the US (AGAIN!) except this time he live-streamed like 99.9% of the whole trip, a massive 400-ish hours of YouTube content one push and day at a time.
Anyway, when he was going across the really boring parts of Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas people kept making Desert Bus jokes in the live chat.
Because it was a lot like Desert Bus, but real.
posted by loquacious at 9:16 AM
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Oh nice! Despite being a big gdq fan, for the good vibes and charity, I have never watched Desert Bus for Hope. I'll fix that this year!
posted by Hermione Dies at 10:39 AM
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The fact that Desert Bus is not only an interrogation of unplayability in game design terms, but was also from an unreleased title is just the perfect touch. It could only be more perfect if it were a Phillips CD-i exclusive.
posted by subocoyne at 12:34 PM
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howlongtobeat's entry for Desert Bus is exactly what you'd think.
posted by subocoyne at 12:36 PM
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pulls to the left the entire time. No chance of walk away and coming back in 2 hours.
I think it pulled to the right?
Either way, the issue was that it also wasn't consistent, so you couldn't try to tilt and prop an analog joystick at just the right angle to counteract the drift, because the drift was sporadic and random.
And it was infuriatingly random as I recall. If my memory is accurate, it might go perfectly straight for a good 15 seconds and then suddenly start drifting off the road again.
posted by loquacious at 1:17 PM
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Note: not actually a real Canadian Heritage minute
posted by scruss at 1:36 PM
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> ...a badly-implemented trivia game where the prize was increasingly less censorship on the footage of topless women.
A couple decades ago I went through a phase of trying every arcade game available for MAME. It was around the time that enough ROMs had been circulating for long enough on private websites that it had become relatively easy to torrent them in batches of a thousand or more courtesy of people who had gotten tired of the gatekeeping.
That was when I learned about some of the game genres that never really caught on outside of Japan, like jigsaw puzzle games where you assembled a drawing of a woman, and mahjong games where winning rounds let you see a woman gradually undress, or... well, basically any kind of table top or card game that could free up enough space on the screen for an image of a woman, you could play it. Some of them had mode switches to control the level of explicitness. Some were anime-style drawings, some were badly traced from photos, but there was a common denominator and it was the lowest.
The gist of a comment I saw recently somewhere was that the internet eventually killed the genre of explicit computer game because you could simply download as many fleshtone pixels as you wanted without having to win a challenge for each one. Except that doesn't seem to be true... Steam lists 800 games under the category "Faith" (at that, most of them seem to be Touhou fan games), and 4,000 under "Sexual Content".
posted by at by at 2:54 PM
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Clearly, we need a patch that reveals a tiny sliver of Jocko the driver each time a point is scored.
posted by delfin at 3:53 PM
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4,000 under "Sexual Content".
There are games for most if not all human activity (rule 34 corollary?). Airline pilot, truck driver, fishing, running, fast food worker, painter, pressure washer, etc. and whatever the hell eve online is simulating. So seems there would be lots of sexual games or games that have sexual content.
posted by Mitheral at 5:02 PM
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There is a free VR version that is multiplayer so three friends can join you.
posted by Sophont at 3:08 AM
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Fans of Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont Spelling Bee may enjoy Graham Stark's Spelling Wasp, featuring Dan Olson and some internet personalities I'm less familiar with.
posted by Jeanne at 4:07 PM
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From left to right, the contestants are:
Travis Eriksen, the program director for Child's Play Charity. It was a small misstatement from him from last year about their grants to add pediatric gaming and technology specialists staff to children's hospitals which lead to the memetic phrase: "Child's Play Charity puts people in hospitals."
Meghan Wolff, co-host of the Magic: the Gathering podcast Good Luck High Five.
Of course, Foldable Human Dan Olson, and;
Erika Cole, Twitch streamer and prize shipping and Craft-a-long coordinator for Desert Bus for Hope.
posted by TrishaLynn at 5:23 PM
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> and whatever the hell eve online is simulating
space excel
posted by okayturnip at 12:35 AM
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