The worst video game ever made is back. But why?
From the arcades to the handhelds, mobile phones to home consoles, absolutely nothing could prepare the video game world for the unrivaled experience that is 1993’s "Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties" — a critically maligned game which, after a quiet rerelease last spring, is now getting a special edition rerelease on the long-defunct ’90s video game system Panasonic 3DO.
For the uninitiated, "Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties" was released as an “interactive romantic comedy” game meant for adults where, in a series of images with PowerPoint pacing, the player has to make “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style choices to help John, a struggling plumber on a bike, successfully woo Jane, a woman he meets in a parking lot as she’s en route to a job interview. What follows is a tale of corruption, Los Angeles action, narrator murder and a happily ever after — with plenty of raunchy ’90s shock humor along the way.
Released independently for the Windows PC and Panasonic’s aforementioned, relatively short-lived 3DO home console at a time before there were industry-wide ratings on games, this adults-only experience may have buried seeds in the minds of ’90s video game magazine readers, who perhaps encountered the scathing reviews in the July 1994 issue of PC Gamer (which gave the game a 3 out of 100 score and called it “the nadir of entertainment”), or who were vaguely intrigued by the title being the only video game for sale in the back-of-the-magazine catalogs with an “18+ only” warning.
While this style/genre of video game was known and embraced in Japan at this time as “visual novels,” the Americans behind "Plumbers" were unaware, and came to the same format through parallel thought. According to the Good Bad Flicks documentary on the game, which is included with the game’s new "Definitive Edition" release, "Plumbers" is the brainchild of Michael Anderson, who in the ’70s and ’80s was a pioneer in early forms of the internet and digital mapping. After he sold his digital mapping company in the ’80s, the lucrative buyout gave Anderson the time and money to — as he put it —“get into trouble.” This was a time where there was interest in “interactive movies,” and given the thrills he found at previous bleeding edges of technology, he explored what it would take to give a cost-effective romantic comedy audience-dictated movie experience a go.
Since full-motion video games weren’t quite at the crisp visual quality for home consoles with modern CD-ROM limitations, Anderson approached making the game as a frame-by-frame experiment. He’d approach potential actors in person, including Jeanne Basone — a face familiar to wrestling fans as “Hollywood” from the original "GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling."
Basone told The Times that filming was “like shooting a movie you shoot out of sequence, so honestly, if you’ve ever been on a set you understand, you just need to trust your producer and director and that’s just what we did. Plus we had a whole lotta fun shooting it and being on location.” While the guerrilla-style filmmaking around Los Angeles landmarks may have not quite translated the on-set fun to players in 1994, it does look like they were having a blast at time time, perhaps giving the game a bit more charm 30 years later.
That charm is something the Limited Run Games team behind "Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition" hoped to maximize while fashioning the game’s resurrection. LRG co-founder and CEO Josh Fairhurst went through the effort to not only track down the "Plumbers" rights holder, but purchase the IP to help make it happen.
“As one of the worst games of all time, we wanted to explore what led to its existence and why it is important,” Fairhurst told The Times, adding “I always value being as authentic as possible to the original experience. With 'Plumbers Don't Wear Ties: Definitive Edition,' we did our best to not mess with the core game. It's supposed to be bad, so we didn't want to try and make it good. I felt like that would miss the point. Instead, we faithfully cleaned up and restored the game's images, did our best to repair the audio without overriding the tinny low-budget charm, and surrounded the game with documentary footage, commentary, and extra features that do their best to contextualize it.”
One of the new "Definitive Edition" producer/developers Joe Modzeleski felt a full range of emotions in the early stages of development. He told The Times, “It was funny … but it wasn’t long after that, the thoughts started to be, ‘Oh, this is going to be difficult’ because there is nothing compelling to sell here and we have to make a profit.”
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Compared to Limited Run Games’ previous remastered ’90s video game cult classics like the controversial "Night Trap" and "Corpse Killer," this wasn’t a game that could be sold on gameplay. Fellow producer/developer Audi Sorlie also told The Times there was a real ground-up challenge in bringing back "Plumbers" with its proper elements as well. “Nothing really survived of this stuff. It was a weird throwaway project in the ’90s. No one is going to keep any of that. This is a problem throughout the entire video game industry, most of the stuff that was done prior to 2005 didn’t get archived so it’s hard for any project to nail down this stuff. And for 'Plumbers' even more so as this was this small project in California.”
Sorlie had to work on the game’s extensive trained AI upscaling, an undertaking that involved taking the game’s 890 images, all 640 x 480 indexed at 256 colors, and bring them to 4K quality — of which the reading and rebuilding combined took a year of compositing and by-hand touch-ups.
So, why put all this effort into something seemingly every video game player would consider objectively bad? Perhaps it’s the fan base, of whom the vast majority likely hasn’t pushed a single button on a "Plumbers" menu before this year. Yes, there’s a "Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties" following, largely thanks to the second life the game has had as an internet meme. In the summer of 2009, longtime YouTube personality James Rolfe dedicated an episode of his series "Angry Video Game Nerd" to "Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties," giving perhaps the first widespread video capture of its gameplay and trademark sleazy absurdity to the world.
Instantly becoming one of his most popular episodes, today his 2011 upload has over 9 million views and has spawned numerous other reviews and revisitations across all corners of the so-bad-it's-good video game fandom. A factory-sealed copy of the original 3DO game sold on eBay last year for $600. The one known existing copy of the PC version was tracked down at Ball State University in 2017, and its subsequent software upload to the internet is considered a triumph of lost media discovery.
Whether you consider the prospective players “fans” or just curious, there’s a proven legacy of "Plumbers" whose presence, whether as an intriguing of-its-time experiment or just the absolute worst of the worst, can have a strong argument for preservation.
Fairhurst describes the need for it as, “We frequently get remasters and rereleases of the best games of all time, but rarely does anyone spend their time and resources on the worst. As odd as this seems to say, I think the worst games of all time are just as historically significant as the best. We should be researching these and examining why they were bad, what made them exist, and how they were received culturally,” adding “I think people will always remember 'Plumbers Don't Wear Ties' and want to experience it in the same way film enthusiasts still view and discuss 'Plan 9 From Outer Space.' Bad games draw our curiosity and I think there's something to that. It's been an honor to get to bring this game back, and I hope that people enjoy getting to experience it.”
This new experience is giving "Plumbers" its biggest public boost ever. To promote the game’s release, Basone appeared at Boston gaming convention PAX East to meet the legions of old and new "Plumbers" fans. Basone told The Times, “I couldn’t wait to dive back in and make something that was being updated for what I thought was lost long ago, and will be on all game platforms today. I am proud of everybody who worked on it in 1993, and so happy Limited Run Games decided to release this updated version.” Given that LRG now owns the Plumbers IP, the question of a possible sequel seems more possible now than ever. However, when asked, Modzeleski laughed and said “Well, yeah, but don’t encourage that!” with Sorlie adding “Have you played this game?”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
