Desert Bus

Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors is a compilation of six unrelated minigames. Each game is prefaced with a full-motion video introduction starring the magicians Penn Jillette and Teller, who form the duo Penn & Teller. The game distinguishes between the owner of the game, who is aware of its functionality, and an unsuspecting person (the "sucker"). Using the hidden "owner menu", the owner can set up certain minigames to play practical jokes on the sucker.

For What's Your Sign?, the owner inputs the sucker's birthday into the owner menu beforehand. When the sucker is playing, Penn & Teller ask them a series of questions and pretend to use their "Personometer" to guess the sucker's astrological sign and birthday. For Mofo the Psychic Gorilla, the sucker draws a standard playing card, which the owner underhandedly inputs into the game. Mofo then asks the sucker several questions, also encouraging them to lie, and pretends to guess the card.

Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors was developed by Absolute Entertainment, which also planned to publish it. Before the game's production, the company had been in a bad financial state, and one of its games, Goofy's Hysterical History Tour (1993), had built up a large unsold inventory that would have cost Absolute Entertainment millions of dollars to withdraw from customs. Around this time, the producer Barry Marx, who knew Jillette, conceived a game revolving around Penn & Teller. While they had previously received several video game pitches, Absolute Entertainment was the first to offer them direct involvement with the production.

The duo designed the game with Marx and worked on it for seven weeks—with six-to-eight-hour sessions on three or four days per week—during mid-1993. They spent the majority of their time on the Smoke and Mirrors minigame. The television producer Eddie Gorodetsky came up with the idea for Desert Bus as an overly realistic and non-violent game, a response to Janet Reno, the United States Attorney General and an opponent of violence in video games. Some time later, Penn & Teller recorded their full-motion video sequences in a temporary blue screen studio at Absolute Entertainment's New Jersey headquarters.

Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors received mixed reviews. Captain Squideo, reviewing it for GamePro, noted that the controls needed to efficiently play tricks were complicated, although their correct use was satisfying once learned. They lamented an inconsistent graphical quality, where the video sequences stood out positively while the minigames looked "standard at best". Ken Badziak of Electronic Gaming Monthly shared this sentiment, while Dan Vebber of VideoGames faulted the graphics in general.

Captain Squideo commended the compilation for its "sharp and clear" sound. Badziak regarded Desert Bus as the best feature but was unsure about the compilation's overall appeal. Zach Meston wrote for VideoGame Advisor that Desert Bus was "hysterical", whereas Vebber called it "brilliant in concept", even if boring. Vebber and Entertainment Weekly's Bob Strauss found little replay value in the compilation, while the reviewer for Mean Machines Sega labeled it a "crap idea" that should be avoided.

Because Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors was never officially released, press copies became valuable collector's items, even if they were empty boxes. Meston rediscovered his press copy in December 2000 and soon came into contact with Michael Thomasson of Good Deal Games, which had released several previously canceled Sega CD games. Thomasson said in 2003 that it took Good Deal Games and its partner OlderGames two and a half years "to get the licence at a good price". However, they were ultimately unsuccessful in multiple attempts to negotiate a publishing agreement with Penn & Teller and the lawyers managing Absolute Entertainment's assets, and Penn & Teller subsequently abandoned the talks, citing that they had another video game in development.

Thomasson had given up on his endeavor to release the game by mid-2005. In September 2005, the video game archivist Frank Cifaldi obtained a backup of a review copy and published a review on the Something Awful forums, eventually adding a torrent file to distribute it. After this torrent became defunct, a new download was provided by the website Waxy in early 2006.