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A Life Well Wasted

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A Life Well Wasted

Robert Ashley

Video Games, Leisure

4.81.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2009

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Robert Ashley helps people in videogames instead of helping people in real life, meets a comedy group who spend hundreds of hours every year playing the most boring videogame ever created, talks to a guy who quit playing games for a year, and profiles the best selling pinball designer of all time.

Transcript

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0:00.0

To start off with, it's incredibly boring.

0:02.8

You basically take on the role of a driver of a coach bus going from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada, and you drive a perfectly

0:17.8

straight stretch of road for eight hours at 45 miles an hour and all you encounter the entire time is a

0:27.2

slight list to the right in the bus so you have to constantly correct it back onto the road. Desert Bus.org.

0:49.0

Org. You see they are doing the world's most boring video game, the most boring video game ever created

0:56.8

called Desert Bus, and they are doing it without stop.

1:01.0

Desert Bus is part of a Sega CD compilation of games called Penanteller's

1:04.7

Smokin' Mirrors. Penanteller of course,

1:07.0

Magicians, now in Vegas, formerly in Broadway.

1:10.3

The very early 90s, we were working on a video game called Penanteller, Smoke, and Mirrors.

1:16.8

They have this whole philosophy that violence is entertaining.

1:19.2

And so, around this time you have various forces coming out against video games.

1:24.4

It's almost routine in popular games for players to engage in cannibalism.

1:31.6

At that time, Janet Reno was the bad guy.

1:36.0

And she was coming out and saying that the video games

1:41.0

that depicted fantasy violence were really, really bad and she said something,

1:46.1

which I don't remember, but something really stupid like there should be games that top people

1:50.8

real life skills.

1:52.1

So they said, you know what, we'll just make the most realistic game that we can.

1:56.0

You'd be the bus driver.

1:58.0

And there'd be nothing in the background but boring desert and the same stuff over and over again and you would it would

2:07.2

pull to one side so you didn't keep your hand on the joystick running it you'd'd run off the road. And then in your entire run from

...

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