Famous magician Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame) is teaming up with Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford to create a remake of 1995’s Desert Bus videogame, specifically for virtual reality.
Desert Bus isn’t a regular game; it’s a “trick minigame” included on the unreleased Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors for Sega CD, an old gaming system from the 1990s. Finishing the game requires you to drive a bus (through the desert, hence the name) from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada.
That’s not so bad on the surface, until you learn that you’ll need to complete the drive in real time. Oh, and the bus can’t go over 45 miles per hour (72 kph), and like Dark Souls, you can’t pause either. Doing either of these things will cause your trip to fail and you’ll need to start the eight-hour journey from minute one. Once you reach either destination, you can claim victory or choose to turn around and start the trip again.
The game is now a popular streaming property, especially for charities. Chief among which is Desert Bus for Hope which raised $600 000 (almost R10 million) last November in a 159-hour marathon.
On Penn’s Sunday School podcast he announced plans to include the game as part of a larger bundle that will only be available for charities, as well as being open for most platforms and the Oculus Rift and PlayStation virtual reality (VR) systems.
If your idea of fun is a simulated eight-hour bus trip and you have the necessary $600 for an Oculus Rift headset, this one’s for you. We don’t know when it’ll be out, but as the VR rush is about to kick off we don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect to see it sometime in 2016.
[Source – Gamasutra]
