In 1993, a group of chancers with no budget fulfilled one man’s dream to make a game. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties was that game. Ported to the 3DO in 1994 from its small PC release, the game became a niche cult classic for being absolutely awful. The FMV adventure contains almost no FMV at all, it’s a slide show of photos with campy porn-level acting and a nonsensical script. For many, this would be their worst game they’d ever play.
Pop culture and time let us review things differently, bringing love and charm to a cult classic. Over 30 years later, Limited Games has remastered the scrappy game into 4K, and created a full documentary about the game and the industry in the early 90s and chopped it up to be discovered in a maze-like minigame. You can only unlock parts of the documentary if you play the game and see a variety of different choices, so unless you do a perfect playthrough, you’ll get to experience the pain multiple times.
The FMV adventure (which is really a photo-based visual novel) sees you alternate between John, a tie-wearing plumber who’s busy posing on his motorbike, and Jane, a scantily clad lady on the way to a job interview. For each, you’ll hear their inner monologue, talk to other characters, and occasionally get to make a story decision. Most choices have three options, which will either drive John and Jane together, apart, or create a crazy comedy version. There are also several narrators commenting on your choices in a very dated, schlocky way. None of it seems to make sense, in a “this is my first go at a script” style. Overacted voice-overs try to cover the cracks with gusto and enthusiasm, and it’s this disconnect that makes the game such a cult classic car crash to play.
Once you’ve played the game once, you can unlock the ability to save and repeat specific scenes over and over to choose alternative paths quicker. There aren’t tons of choices, but I do give the game credit for having genuine branching paths and a full choice tree to explore, so you can see everything. You can flip between the original and restored photos at any time. It’s a nice touch. For most of the runtime, the game plays itself, like an autoplay visual novel.
The new unlockable documentary is great, and on par with the boom of 2010’s indie game documentaries that all arrived on Steam at once. It weaves together behind-the-scenes artefacts, interviews with Jeanne Basone who played Jane, and a history of FMV games too. It helps put clarity on how the game was able to be made, why it ended up on the 3DO, and how it became a cult classic. The talking heads have excitement and energy, as do the people who worked on the game. They knew it was a low-budget, crazy idea, but they clearly had fun and remember the experience fondly in retrospect. The maze you have to run around the unlock each segment is a Doom ripoff, and you can fire a couple of plungers at the baddie to stop him from catching you and ending the minigame. It is basic, clunky, and not very good. I think that’s the point. Thankfully, once unlocked, you can view everything in a suitably early 90s menu that borrows from the bold Geocities-like web design of its time.
For me, this is a game that is difficult to score. It is an awful game, with questionable quality, but full of campy charm. It reminds me of how Kimulator Games runs today. Kimulator makes FMV games in their living room and garden, pretending it’s something better. They have no money, but they have the creative spirit, and that carries the band of friends a long way. I feel like you can trace this back to Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. This is like The Room for video games. If you like the sound of that, you’ll be getting this regardless of the score. For everyone else, if you’d like to see the worst of video gaming history through a kind lens, this might be for you, too.
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