Pinball Adventures - Volume 2

By Andrew MacBain and Veronica MacBain

The Pinball Adventure’s Team, will mystify you with a unique magical edition focusing on a number of the most important pinball machines that take magic in many different directions.  Meet with Magic superstars Penn & Teller, and finds out what their ties are in the pinball world and learn about the video game they created.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pinball Adventures
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999422639

Book preview

SMOKE & MIRRORS: How Penn & Teller Created the Best Worst Video Game Ever and Indirectly Helped Raise over $4 million.

Earlier this year I met up with both Penn & Teller after their magic show in Vegas, and asked them if pinball has had any influence in their lives.

With Penn, he explained that he loved to play pinball and is drawn to any machine if he see one while traveling or at a local joint at home. He said that he had owned several pinballs and that he enjoyed them that much he donated several of his own pins to the Vegas Pinball hall of Fame. Think about that the next time you are down in Vegas and playing a pinball machine, it might have been owner by Mr. Magic himself.

Teller told a different store relating to pinball. He remembers one of his first jobs; he had to empty the money out of the old pinballs machines and other arcade machines way back in the day. He would not say what day but I am sure not that long ago.

Then they both asked me had I heard of their game Smoke and Mirrors?

And then, they ended the interview with a photo.

When I replied to the office I told Ryan about the interview and the game Smoke

and Mirrors and Ryan told me their story…

In April 1995, Penn and Teller were set to release a video game for the Sega CD console, aptly named Smoke and Mirrors. Smoke and Mirrors was a set of minigames in one cartridge intended as a bag of tricks, gags, and, yes, smoke and mirrors, metaphorically speaking. It was never released as the game publisher went bankrupt before they could sell the game and, it was lost to time.

One mini-game in Smoke and Mirrors was so different from any other video game it gained a cult following for its ridiculous nature. This game was called Desert Bus. The game concept for Desert Bus was created by Penn, Teller, and, their good friend, Eddie Gorodetsky (an award winning writer for shows such as Two and a Half Men and Saturday Night Live). It was intended as satire to work against the anti-video-game lobby, which Teller was an active opponent of. Moving on to the game, what is Desert Bus exactly?

Desert Bus is the most inoffensive, ultra-realistic bus driver simulator ever created. The goal of the game is to make the boring, and realistic, 360-mile journey between Tucson, AZ and Las Vegas, NV at a maximum speed of 45 MPH. At that speed, the journey takes 8 full hours from finish. When you complete the journey one-way, you get a single point and can drive all the way back to Tucson, over another 8 hours, to get another point.

Since this is ultra-realistic, there is no way to pause or quit the game (aside from shutting off the console). You’re also deprived of any excitement while playing; there are no passengers on the bus, any traffic, and only sprawling sand as far as you could see. The only entertainment you have is the odd rock, road sign, or, even rarer, bug splattering against the windshield. You do have the option to honk the horn and hear a squeak as you open the passenger door of the bus (although you never see it open).

What makes this infamously boring as life game the powerhouse it is? The driving itself. You might assume the bus drives in a straight line. It doesn’t. If you hold down the drive button, the bus will slowly drift to the right and the engine stalls when you reach the sand. Once the engine stalls, the bus stops and your journey forward halts. To make it even better, instead of restarting from the beginning instantly, you get towed back to the start of the line, in real-time. That means, if you’ve driven 6 hours and 42 minutes toward Vegas, you’re tow back to Tucson takes 6 hours and 42 minutes. At least do nothing, and the bus looks like it’s driving itself.

Now, were you paying attention, you’ll have questions about how I played an unreleased game from the mid 90’s. Three weeks before Absolute Entertainment (the publisher for Smoke and Mirrors) went bankrupt, they sent media copies out to game review websites and magazines.

While most of these copies were probably thrown out, lost, or destroyed over the years, one copy made it to Frank Cifaldi in September 2005. Frank, a video game archivist, preservationist, historian, developer and founder of Lost Levels (http://www.lostlevels.org/), a website aimed at preserving obscure and rare video games. Frank brought Desert Bus, along with the entire Smoke and Mirrors game, back from the dead. He created a review and posted the actual game file to several online forums where anyone could download and play it.

Fast forward to 2006 and Desert Bus has gained a cult following. It grabbed the attention of Paul Saunders, a co-founder of LoadingReadyFun, a comedy troupe and video production house in Victoria, BC, Canada. Paul wanted to use Desert Bus for a comedy sketch where he and the others in the troupe would play the game for as long as they could while streaming it online for others to watch.

When Paul brought his idea to the other members of the group, it evolved. James Turner (a member of LoadingReadyFun) added to the idea by suggesting they use whatever internet fame they had to turn this into a fundraiser for Child’s Play (http://childsplaycharity.org/). Child’s Play is a charity that purchases and donates video games and game consoles to children’s wards in hospitals around the world. Thus, The First Annual Desert Bus for Hope was created in November 2007.

A simple website was made where anyone could donate money to the cause. For each donation received, the group would pledge to drive a portion of the 8 hour stretch of game. In a New Yorker online article from 2013, Graham Stark, co-founder of LoadingReadyFun, was quoted as saying, The event itself was very cobbled together in the first year. The camera’s wide-angle lens was held on with rubber bands. They had no plans for food or much of anything else. Luckily for them, Penn and Teller knew the fundraiser and Teller contacted the group and offered to buy them lunch every day from a local Chinese restaurant. Both Penn and Teller donated $500 each that first year.

The goal the troupe had set out the first year was $5,000, but, over 108 hours, they raised an astonishing $22,085 and a world record of 5 points in Desert Bus. Now, going into its 12th year, come November 9th, 2018, Desert Bus for Hope has raised close to $4.5 million and, last year, played for 158 hours. The team plans to continue playing for years to come. Graham Stark commented that Desert Bus is without a doubt, the very worst video game I have ever played. You can visit the Desert Bus for Hope website at https://desertbus.org/.

Due to the attention the game garnered from this event and the cult following that formed over the years since its revival, the game was provided on both Android and iOS app stores but was taken down due to copyright issues last year. However, you can still find versions under different names available for download and a Virtual Reality (VR) version made for PC, released in 2013. If you have an itch to do a repetitive, monotonous task for hours on end while depriving yourself of proper nutrition and sleep, try to set a new world record!

So I guess we all know the rest of the story. Magicians dabble in both Pinball and Arcade games.

Ryan Ponto

Andrew MacBain