Desert Bus For Hope

It's back starting at 6:00PM PST, November 18th, 2011. If you have never heard of Desert Bus For Hope here is a short description:

Desert Bus for Hope is the internet’s oldest and most successful charity gaming marathon.

Created in 2007 by internet sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun, since its inception, Desert Bus for Hope has grown from an event broadcast from a living room to a professionally organized fundraiser that has inspired hundreds of people all over the world to start their own gaming marathons. It takes an organizing committee of 12 people to plan Desert Bus for Hope, and a further 10 to 15 dedicated volunteers once the event begins.

So How does Desert Bus for Hope work?

Desert Bus is actually a mini-game from the never-released Sega CD game Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors. In it a player controls a virtual bus that drives an eight-hour-long strip of highway between Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, on an endless loop. The difficulty is that the bus lists slightly to the right and must be constantly corrected or it will crash. It’s the worst video game ever made, and we play it for as long as donations come in. In order to maximize the pain and suffering for the Desert Bus team, we have five drivers who must play Desert Bus for 24 hours at a time. In order to keep things interesting for our viewers we have live and silent auctions, celebrity guests and a lot of silliness.

And if you wanted to check out what the game looks like you can watch this video to get an idea:


And if you want to play the game yourself you can play it here: http://desertbus-game.org/

I was watching the live stream today. Their description of "professionally organized fundraiser" is a very loose description. It was more like a very poorly lit back room where everyone spoke at the same time, people would walk in front of the main camera, and everyone said "yay!" too much and kept yelling "donate more!" to the camera. Extremely UNprofessional group of amateurs. Oh great job they are so thoughtful, giving to charity, wait actually everyone else is giving to charity while they beg for more money and give out other people's donations as auction rewards.