School Bus Driver

Year 1988, I'm twelve years old and my dad bought me my first PC. Instead of getting me something sensible — Wing Commander or at least Alley Cat — I ended up with a floppy disk where I drove a school bus. These things just happened back then.

School Bus Driver is an action game by GameTek where you play as a school bus driver in a small American town. The mission is straightforward: drive a predetermined route, pick up kids at marked stops, and get them to school. No apocalyptic scenarios, no aliens. Just a bus, streets, and a bunch of schoolkids waiting on the corner.

The game is divided into several levels with gradually increasing difficulty — the first serves as a tutorial where you learn the route and controls. The streets are simple, repetitive, and the map isn't large, so you'll get oriented pretty quickly. Controlling the bus on the keyboard feels like the era it came from: a bit stiff, a bit imprecise, exactly how it was back then. The graphics use a basic EGA palette, sound comes through PC speaker or Sound Blaster depending on your setup. Nothing that made the game stand out then, and certainly nothing that stands out today.

What made School Bus Driver different was its intent. It wasn't a shooter or a platformer — it was a title aimed squarely at younger players, kids who were just getting acquainted with computers. In that context, it makes sense: simple rules, zero stress, no game overs after the second tutorial sentence. At the turn of the eighties and nineties, a game like this had a place in households where the PC served the whole family. Today it's an artifact — a reminder of the time when software makers actually thought about their six-year-old target demographic instead of just handing them Doom.

What aged poorly? Practically everything for players over ten years old. The gameplay becomes repetitive after twenty minutes, the technical side offers bare minimum, and the game offers no challenge to keep you at the monitor much longer. But if you're one of those people who collects DOS rarities or want to see what software aimed at the youngest looked like back then, School Bus Driver has its own peculiar museum value. You can run it in your browser through emulators like Internet Archive without breaking a sweat, and after half an hour you'll have the full picture. It's not worth more time than that — and I say that as someone who finished worse games back then.