Drive a virtual bus from Tucson to Las Vegas at 45 miles per hour on an empty, unchanging desert highway for eight real-time hours. You cannot pause. The bus veers slightly right, so taping down the controller strands you in the sand and summons a tow truck that also drives in real time. Your reward is one point. This episode traces the wildest life cycle of any piece of media the hosts have encountered: Penn and Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, a 1995 Sega CD game built explicitly to prank the owner’s friends. Hidden owner menus rigged astrology and card tricks like Mofo the Psychic Gorilla, competitive scams like Buzz Bombers secretly flooded a friend’s screen with penalties, and Sun Scorcher faked a television meltdown.

Desert Bus itself was political satire: television producer Eddie Gorodetsky’s malicious-compliance response to Janet Reno and the congressional panic over violent games, an overly realistic, non-violent simulation of a mundane job. The finished game, with rotoscoped animation, cameos from Debbie Harry and Lou Reed, and a real-world party bus prize, was sent to reviewers in spring 1995 and then died when publisher Absolute Entertainment sank its capital into unsold Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour cartridges. A decade later archivist Frank Cifaldi released a review copy online, the comedy group LoadingReadyRun launched Desert Bus for Hope in November 2007, and the game became an engine for millions in charity.

• Why the game explicitly lies to the person holding the controller and asks the owner to perform
• How cartridge manufacturing economics bankrupted a publisher before a CD game could ship
• Collectors paying real money for empty promotional boxes of a game nobody had played
• The 108-hour first marathon, 22,000 dollars for Child’s Play, and 500 dollars each from Penn and Teller
• VR remakes, Gearbox’s free Steam version, Atari 2600 homebrews, and 6 million dollars raised by 2019