Desert Bus: A VR Game Where You Literally Spend Eight Hours On A Bus!

This Might Be The Best Thing Mankind Has Ever Accomplished

VR has truly broken boundaries in the gaming scene as of late, and it seems that with every month that goes by we keep getting more and more titles that immerse us into fantastical worlds, becoming the hero of our own story. Whether its shooting down robots, leaping across canyons or taking on the Baker Family in Resident Evil 7, all these experiences are at the very least engrossing and entertaining.

And then there’s Desert Bus. 

Originally made on the PC over twenty years ago, this purposefully boring experience where you live out the actual time it takes to travel between Arizona and Nevada has now been revamped and turned into a virtual reality video game. And yes, it really is just eight hours of you on a bus

According to an article on Polygon –

A VR edition of the epochally awful, intentionally mind-numbing minigame from the unreleased Penn & Teller’s Smoke & Mirrors 21 years ago has a listing on Steam. The game supports the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets, plus motion controllers and gamepads (partial support).

It looks like the game has been remastered with new graphics. But the gameplay is still the same: Drive a bus from Tucson, Ariz. to Las Vegas, in real-time (eight hours), fighting its misaligned steering the whole way.

If you can’t keep the bus on the road, and it wrecks, it is towed back to its originating city in real time where the player must start over. Each completed trip awards one (1) point. Reaching the destination results in an offer to drive back, for another trip that earns another (1) point. Importantly, the user may not pause the game. That means if you want that high score, you better have an empty milk jug sitting next to your seat.

Desert Bus VR promises new interactive features. The biggest is multiplayer. Oh yes, you can share the misery of the long haul with three friends, who may “sit, wave, and even throw wads of paper at the driver,” according to the description.

Drivers in VR may open the bus door when stopped at a bus station, tap the “fully-interactive air freshener” to release its scent, and honk the bus’ horn. The radio also carries “a variety of engaging radio programs” featuring Penn Jillette, the illusionist/actor and one-half of the game’s namesake.

The original Desert Bus was one of a series of satirical minigames in Penn & Teller’s Smoke & Mirrors, along with Mofo the Psychic Gorilla, Buzz Bombers and What’s Your Sign, in which the owner of the game was given the means to lure unsuspecting players into gullible, open-ended video game pranks. Desert Bus was intentionally designed to be as boring and unobjectionable as possible, coming in the mid-1990s during the moral panic over video game violence that gave rise to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

While we’re not sure it will win any awards, you can still check out out video below to see if Desert Bus made its way our picks for Top 10 Video Games That Would Be Epic in VR!