Desert Bus game: why it never shipped and how to play

Desert Bus is a minigame in Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors, developed and published by Absolute Entertainment for the Sega CD and set for an April Fools' Day release in 1995. It was finished, but Absolute Entertainment shut down in late 1995 before it went on sale. The game asks you to drive a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas in real time, which takes about eight hours. Most people know it from Desert Bus for Hope, a charity stream that has driven that bus every year since 2007 and had raised $12,980,824.20 by the end of 2025.

Desert Bus was a joke about game violence that took five minutes to program

Smoke and Mirrors was a compilation of six minigames, designed by Penn Jillette and Teller with producer Barry Marx over about seven weeks in mid-1993. Desert Bus came from television producer Eddie Gorodetsky, who proposed an overly realistic, non-violent game as a reply to Attorney General Janet Reno, who had come out against violent video games.

Programmer Mark Morris said: "Desert Bus took like, five minutes to program." Absolute built the game for the Sega CD because it was the only platform the developers knew well. Morris later favored a Windows 95 version, on the reasoning that PC owners were closer to the audience the package was aimed at.

You drive about 360 miles from Tucson to Las Vegas at a top speed of 45 mph. The bus veers right the whole way. Leave the road and the bus stalls until a tow truck arrives, and then it is towed back to Tucson, also in real time. The scenery is one two-lane road, and the one event is an occasional bug hitting the windshield. The horn works.

There is no pause, and the manual says so: "There's no pause feature. No, it's not an oversight. Does your life have a pause control?" I think that line is the best joke in the whole package.

Reaching Las Vegas scores one point, and the way to keep playing is to turn around. The return trip to Tucson is worth another point. Fighting Rhinos, Rabbits and Pigs writes that the score may cap at 99 points, which would take about 33 days of nonstop driving.

The finished game never shipped because Absolute Entertainment ran out of money

Smoke and Mirrors was announced at CES in 1994 for that holiday season and moved to April 1, 1995. The Sega CD date slipped again to July 1995. A PC version was penciled in for October 1995 and a 3DO version for early 1996.

Review copies went out around May 1995. Absolute was already in poor financial shape after Goofy's Hysterical History Tour left a large pile of unsold inventory. The company ceased operations and laid off most of its staff in late 1995, and every version went on indefinite hold. Teller said the Sega CD format was dead by then, and no other company wanted the game.

Ken Badziak named Desert Bus the best part of the package. Dan Vebber called it "brilliant in concept." The whole package got 16.5 out of 20 from GamePro and 4.25 out of 10 from Game Informer.

A review copy leaked in 2005 and a charity stream followed in 2007

Reviewer Zach Meston found his press copy in December 2000. Good Deal Games tried to license Desert Bus but gave up by mid-2005 without a publishing deal. In September 2005 Frank Cifaldi obtained a backup of a review copy, reviewed it on the Something Awful forums and posted a torrent. When the torrent died, Waxy hosted a fresh download in early 2006.

LoadingReadyRun, a group based in Victoria, BC, started Desert Bus for Hope on November 23, 2007, a fundraiser for Child's Play, the charity that provides toys and games to children in more than 180 hospitals. Four people took turns at the controls for 108 hours and raised $22,805. Penn and Teller gave $500 each. The four drivers set a record of five points before a crash.

Donations buy hours, and each extra hour costs 7% more than the one before. The first hour is $1 and 64 hours take $1,070.80 in total, but a full 14 days would take about $106.6 billion. It took until 2024 for donations to reach 168 hours, a full week, for the first time, and viewers closed the last gap within 15 minutes of the deadline.

The 2008 run lasted slightly more than five days and raised over $70,000. Lifetime donations passed $5 million in 2018 and $10 million in 2023, and the 2025 run alone raised $1,052,000.01. A documentary about the event, We Are Desert Bus, came out in 2019.

Early runs used an original Sega CD or a JVC X'Eye. The 2020 event was the first without that hardware and ran on a cloud-hosted emulator. Original hardware came back in 2023, and in 2024 the stream moved to a MiSTer Pi.

Play

Where to play Desert Bus today: free on Steam, or on the stream

The original was never released, so no store sells it. The playable version today is Desert Bus VR on Steam, free, made by Dinosaur Games and published by Gearbox Software on November 27, 2017. It needs SteamVR but also runs without a headset, and the store page lists Windows 7 SP1 through Windows 10. As of October 23, 2026 it holds a Very Positive rating, 87% of 1,730 reviews. The remake adds a little to do: one of the radio stations has Penn Jillette talking, and you can open the door and use the air freshener.

Shiny Shoe made a free Desert Bus VR for the Oculus Rift in November 2014, and Amateur Pixels sold Android and iOS versions for $0.99 in November 2011, with the money going to charity. Clever Machine Studios put out Desert Bus 2600 for the Atari 2600 in 2013, and an Intellivision version followed in 2016. A free homebrew version exists for the Wii.

The 2026 run, the 20th, began October 23 at 4 PM PDT.

Questions people ask

Is Desert Bus a real game?

Yes. It was a finished Sega CD minigame inside Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors, completed and sent to reviewers in 1995. It was never sold, so the people who played the original did it through a 2005 leak.

When is Desert Bus for Hope 2026?

It started October 23, 2026 at 4 PM PDT. There is no fixed end date, because donations decide how many hours the bus drives. The money goes to Child's Play.

What is Desert Bus on Roblox?

A separate experience with the same name, out on Roblox by June 2024. Players earn titles, for example Voyager for covering 200 miles. It is not the 1995 game, and it plays nothing like the eight-hour Sega CD drive.

Is Desert Bus on Steam?

Yes, as Desert Bus VR, free on Steam since November 27, 2017. It works with a SteamVR headset or on a regular screen. The original Sega CD game has never had an official release on any store.