Double Fine’s Thank You Bus Driver lands on 14 October

Thank You Bus Driver comes out on PC on 14 October, and Double Fine has just announced that its little driving game has passed 25,000 wishlists on Steam. The idea fits in a sentence: you drive the town bus, you have to stay on schedule, and you are allowed to slap any passenger who breaks the rules. According to PC Gamer, it is the first game from Tim Schafer’s studio since it parted ways with Xbox. It arrives under a new label, Double Fine Action Labs, set up for short and offbeat projects. The scale is modest, much like the prototypes the studio builds during its internal game jams.

At a glance

Thank You Bus Driver, the bus game where you slap passengers

On its Steam page, Thank You Bus Driver describes itself as a chaotic bus driving game. You play a small town’s bus driver who is just trying to get through the day with as little rule breaking and as much gratitude as possible. Those thank-yous work as fuel: the happier your riders are, the more time you get to reach the next stop.

Every route comes down to three priorities. First, you enforce the bus rules, which change every day and keep growing, slapping offenders and throwing repeat troublemakers out of the back door. Next, you stay on track, even if that means checking the map mid-turn or cutting through a cornfield. Finally, the timetable is tight, and passengers get upset if their stop takes too long to arrive.

As the days go by, the thank-yous you collect unlock knick-knacks for the bus and new versions of the town. The screenshots released by the studio show an inked, black and white cartoon style, seen from the driver’s seat, a look that recalls GHOST EATER, another indie game drawn in black and white manga style. For now, the game’s Steam page only lists a Windows version.

A project put together in a few weeks

The idea came from Will Koehler, a developer at Double Fine, and a small team at the studio built it in a matter of weeks, according to the announcement posted on Steam on 10 September. Double Fine presents Thank You Bus Driver as an example of what can come out of Amnesia Fortnight, its tradition of two-week prototypes, once the project has been polished.

With this release, the studio is also launching a new label, Double Fine Action Labs. Double Fine calls it its label for “weird, little games”, pointing to an interview Tim Schafer gave to GamesBeat. On Steam, that label is listed as the publisher, with Double Fine Productions as the developer.

The timing matters too. As PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk and GamingOnLinux both point out, Thank You Bus Driver is Double Fine’s first game since Xbox cut ties with the studio less than three months ago, as part of Microsoft’s restructuring. It has been a turbulent stretch for the division, which also saw 268 roles cut and Halo handed to Activision. Double Fine is back on the road on its own, with a short project.

25,000 wishlists ten days before launch

On 3 October, the studio announced on Steam that Thank You Bus Driver had just crossed 25,000 wishlists. It also opened a Keymailer campaign so that content creators can request a code before launch. On Steam’s ranking of the most wishlisted unreleased games, it sat in 1,713th place that same day.

Revealed on 10 September, the game launches barely a month later, which leaves it little time to build an audience. For comparison, Whispers in the Fog, a horror project made by a single developer, announced 34,000 wishlists on 6 September.

Thank You Bus Driver is out on Steam on 14 October, and its store page doesn’t show a price yet. In its 3 October update, the studio told players it was “a little less than two weeks” away, just enough time to get the first shift ready.