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.
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 [email protected].
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.
Huge thanks to the blogs and game sites who have–even today, a few days away from our official start–thrown a link or two our way.
GamePro posted an article celebrating our twibbon support, which you can read here.
Pretty Gamer has posted an extremely informed and comprehensive article on the event here – kudos to them for the amazing writeup!
Finally, Destructoid has picked up the story and resolved to send folks our way. You can read their shoutout here.
Coverage from major game sites is super important to spreading the word and filling our bus with toys for the children. Thanks so much to all these sites, and to anyone considering linking us in the future–we’ll do our best to link you back as the event progresses!
Huge thanks to OursTeh1337 for creating the awesome Desert Bus for Hope twibbon that has been making-sexy all of our Twitter and Facebook avatars for the last few days. If you want to show support and help folks learn about the event, you can add it to your avatar here.
Also, don’t forget to use the #DesertBus hashtag to help us climb the trending topics. We have no twilight to compete against this year: I’m pretty sure we can take #BlackFriday and #SlapYourself. Even if you can’t donate, you can help the children by spreading the word as we lead up to our start, 6:00pm this Friday.
Tonight marks the Desert Bus 2010 technical mishap test–where we make sure all mishaps are accounted for and happy so that they won’t visit us during the actual run. Sure enough, things have been pretty janky, complete with lag, broken audio and other various issues. However, things are more-or-less working now, so if you’re reading this and want to drop by to help us test out our tech, you can find us here:
We’ll be trying out our new challenge solicitation system, silent auctions and more, so tune in for a taste of things to come.
Ladies and Gentlemen we are on the home stretch. With less than seven days until we get that bus rolling again we are running around trying to get everything ready to go for next Friday. We are all super excited, but with everything that still needs to get done in the next couple days I don’t think we’ve had the chance to really appreciate the support we’ve already received.
In 2007 when we first did this we racked our heads to figure out “The Goal”. This whole online video game marathon hadn’t been done before. Could we really expect to raise $1000.00? Or should we aim higher? We knew going in that at the very least our fan base (which back in late 2007 was considerably smaller than it is now) would support us. So we decided to go with $5000.00, it seemed like a whole lot of money, I don’t believe anyone of us thought we would end where we did when we started up the feed. But as we all know it went farther than that goal and then some. Fast forward to this year. We’re still just under a week from the start of the event and with no incentive like last year we have already raised $2500.00!!! Thats half our goal from the first year. That blows me away, you guys are absolutely incredible. Thank you!!!
So back to this year. Things are shaping up pretty good this year. We hope to be doing our tech run Wednesday evening so if you wanna watch us screw around setting things up and maybe playing a game or two of Magic then check back during the evening on Wednesday (probably between 6PM-10PM PST) I have no idea when we might go live with it or how long we’ll stay online but come check it out.
We also will have a complete list of everything going up for auction this year. And we’ll give you a good idea of when you’ll want to be watching if you want to have your chance to compete for it!
Hope you guys are getting excited! This is going to be another great year!
