Peyton spent the entire next day locked in his dorm room, curtains drawn, fueled by nothing but off-brand energy drinks and pure spite.
The desert highway stretched across the editor like an infinite beige ribbon of doom. He copy-pasted the base loop four hundred times until the finish line sat exactly eight real-life hours away at a steady 60 mph.
Then came the fun stuff.
He cranked the sandstorm intensity to max. Every twenty to forty minutes, a random dust storm would roll in, dropping visibility to near zero. Drift off the road even once? Instant restart. No mercy.
He disabled the pause button, disabled Alt+F4, disabled everything except the emergency power button. If you wanted to quit, you had to hard reboot your entire computer. Take that, quitters.
The radio was his masterpiece.
He licensed thirty of the worst royalty-free tracks the ESDH store had to offer:
- A smooth-jazz rendition of "Greensleeves" played on a broken kazoo
- An actual 1970s anti-drug PSA set to bongos
- The Jeopardy! think music on endless loop
- Hold music from a defunct airline that went bankrupt in 1998
No skip button. No volume slider. Random order only. Eight straight hours of auditory torture.
Mason banged on the door around noon. "Dude, you alive in there? It smells like Red Bull and despair."
"Working on a project!" Peyton yelled back without looking away from the screen.
"Whatever, man. I'm grabbing tacos. Want anything?"
"Victory," Peyton muttered.
He added the crowning touches:
- Speed capped at 65 mph. Just slow enough to make eight hours feel like eternity.
- A "meditation counter" that ticked up every minute you stayed alive.
- A hidden achievement titled "Why Did You Do This to Yourself?" that only unlocked if you finished three times in one week.
Then he designed the ending screen himself.
Black background.
Comic Sans font (because nothing screams "I gave up" like Comic Sans).
One line of glowing white text:
**Congratulations! You just wasted eight hours of your life that you will never get back.**
He leaned back, cracked his neck, and admired his creation.
It wasn't just bad.
It was performance art.
A philosophical statement about the futility of human existence wrapped in a $0.99 price tag.
Store page title: **Lonely Desert Highway**
Tagline: "A meditative journey of solitude and self-reflection."
Description (written in the most pretentious tone he could manage):
> There are no enemies.
> There are no power-ups.
> There is only the road.
> And the quiet realization that time is the one thing money can't buy back.
He gagged a little while typing it, which meant he nailed the vibe.
Price: $0.99 (the lowest the ESDH store allowed).
Tags: Atmospheric, Philosophical, Relaxing, Minimalist, Walking Simulator.
He hovered over the big green PUBLISH button for exactly two seconds.
Then he clicked it.
A popup appeared:
[Game submitted for review. Estimated approval: 24–72 hours.]
Peyton shut the laptop, flopped face-first onto his unmade bed, and laughed into his pillow until his ribs hurt.
Seventy-two hours from now, the game would hit the store.
Nobody would buy it.
It would die in obscurity.
The company would register a glorious fifty-grand loss.
In fourteen days, he'd wake up to fifty thousand beautiful, personal, untouchable dollars.
He'd drop out, rent a beach house in Malibu, and spend the rest of his life playing old PlayStation games and eating tacos.
Life was perfect.
He fell asleep smiling.
He had no idea that, at that exact moment, eight hundred miles north in Seattle, a YouTuber named Joe Brennan (better known as Old Joe) was scrolling through the ESDH "New & Trending" list, hunting for the worst game imaginable to torture himself with on stream.
And there, buried at the very bottom with exactly zero sales and one skull-emoji review, sat Lonely Desert Highway.
Old Joe read the description out loud in his signature deadpan monotone.
"'A meditative journey of solitude.' Eight hours. No pause button. Ninety-nine cents.
Chat… I think we just found the final boss."
His eight hundred thousand viewers spammed crying-laughing emojis.
Old Joe clicked BUY.
The countdown to Peyton's perfect plan exploding in his face had officially begun.