Yes, you heard right! Desert Bus for Hope has just crested $7000. We’ll let you celebrate, though: we have a bus to fuel up! Thanks to everyone for your generous contributions. You’re the ones who make this event happen, and we salute you for it!

Desert Bus is a lot of work. But it’s not just a lot of work on our end to raise cash and give away prizes. There’s a lot of bandwidth going out to broadcast a high quality stream on YouStream, keep the blog updated, upload photos and pictures and then not to have everything slow down to a terrible crawl (as has happened in previous years).

This year, we’re going to be better, faster (and stronger) than ever thanks to our Technical Sponsors – Servint, Shaw Cable and Sharp’s Audio Visual.

Servint were our first sponsor for Desert Bus 4, and they are the reason you’re able to read this blog post at all. They are donating all the hosting for this year, providing unlimited uploads and an enterprise level service package to keep the Desert Bus site on the air. With Servint’s help, the slowdowns and bandwidth grinding that have plagued us in previous years will be a thing of the past.

Of course, we need to upload information as well, and Shaw Cable really stepped up this year and donated their fastest tier of internet service to us for the week – the appropriately sexily named “Nitro Internet”. We’ve really noticed how much faster it’s making our work, and the faster we can work, the more we can do, the more money we can raise, and the more we’ll suffer! Booray!

Finally, our last technical sponsor is Sharp’s Audio Visual. Sharp’s has generously donated us a 52” TV for the week. As you might know, we interact with the Desert Bus chat by running it through an enormous TV that we can read from anywhere in the broadcast area. With a 52” TV, even the most exhausted Desert Bus volunteer will have no problem reading our chat.

So there you have it – the three companies responsible for technical wizardry behind this year’s Desert Bus for Hope. There’s no way we could do it without them. Please visit our sponsors page to learn more about them and visit their websites!

Guys, this is incredible: our friends over at MarioMarathon have made something amazing.

Head over to MarioMarathon.com/DB to check out their fantastic hub-site. Not only can you watch the drivercam and participate in the chat, you can also play Desert Bus yourself and be ranked against other viewers around the world. Frankly, I am astonished, and have no idea what we can possibly do to to repay them in kind, but mark my word, we will think of something!

United in arms for the children, the Child’s Play Superfriends are geared up to go!

Awesome donations – how do they work?

Really well apparently, as I’m happy to announce that we have crested $6000 four hours out from the start of our fourth epic run. We don’t have any milestone pictures to put up for this occasion (feel free to email one to milestone@desertbus.org), but we are all celebrating on this end.  This is gearing up to be the best Desert Bus ever, so buckle in and prepare for a wild ride!

When we started Desert Bus in 2006, $5000 for Child’s Play was our pie in the sky, wouldn’t it be cool goal. Now 6 hours away from the start and $5000 is already rapidly shrinking in our rear view mirror. I can already see that this is going to be an amazing event.

Also, I’m not going to spoil anything about what prizes and auctions we have coming up, but can tell you that our server guy, Ashton, is having to modify the backend because it is taking too long to display them all.

The wheels have continued to churn over the last 24 hours, and we’re thrilled to see more news outlets running with our exciting Desert Bus story.

• Luke Stratford at BeefJack apparently lost the will to live three times just writing about the marathon, so our condolences to him!
• Joystiq’s JC Fletcher wishes us well with our therapy bills following the event.
• GamePolitics picked up on the story of our alliance with ServeInt, and have been sending folks our way.
• GameJournos says he’ll be watching so we’ll do our best to be on our best behaviour.
• Kotaku’s Michael McWhertor uses the word “Shatter” with regard to last year’s record, and all we can say to that is “command received; aye, captain!”

Huge thanks to everyone who has helped promote Desert Bus by writing, tweeting, talking, posting, status updating or otherwise communicating about it. We are so happy for your help, and looking forward to a great run.

We’ve got just over 18 hours to go: all aboard for Vegas!

Thanks to a steady increase in traffic from all your support, we have now crested $4000 of suffering and we haven’t even started yet. With 83 hour on the clock, James, Morgan and I are each fully on the hook for 24 hours of driving. Bill, however, still has a leisurely eleven hours, and Kathleen’s valuable time hasn’t even been touched yet … so we’ve got some work to do for maximum suffering potential. If we do well enough, we could be looking at second shifts.

Thanks, everyone for your support, and send in some 4k milestone pics, if you are so inclined–I’ll append them to this post as they arrive.

Our friends over at The Escapist have put together a fantastic portal for Desert Bus this year in order to funnel their great community down our wacky little charitable highway. Our site, of course, remains the best source for news about the event, but if you want to participate in the big E’s supplementary competition, and arrange to have a pie thrown at your favourite (or least favourite) LRR crew member, you should totally go check it out!

If you’re an Escapist fan, then then there’s more going on for you: if you join The Escapist’s Publisher’s Club membership program via their hub site, they’ll donate $10 to Desert Bus, doubling your pleasure! Also, stay tuned for some call-ins by the Escapist staff. Schedule TBA: watch this space!

Lades and gentlemen, I’m proud to present the first milestone image for this year’s Desert Bus! Wow–$3000, and we’re still over a day out from starting! Here’s to successful tech nights (complete with technical difficulties–but that’s what they’re for!)

If you have an image you’d like to send us to celebrate a fundraising milestone, please send it to milestones@desertbus.org.

What is Desert Bus for Hope? We are a charity fundraiser for Child’s Play. We raise money by playing the world’s worst video game, Desert Bus, in exchange for donations. The more money raised, the longer we play. That said, it would be pretty boring just to watch a bunch of people play the world’s worst video game. That’s why we have contests, live auctions, silent auctions, incredible prizes and a complete lack of self respect. We’ll also be accepting challenges to do all manner of silly things (Songs, Dances, Poems, Readings, etc) in exchange for donations.

If you want more information, please look over our FAQ, or ping us on twitter or Facebook.