In 1966, a fertilizer salesman from El Paso, Texas named Harold Warren created the film Manos: The Hands of Fate, well-known for its bizarre story and production values. Popularized by Mystery Science Theater 3000, it is often referred to as one of the worst- if not the worst- movie ever made.
Recently, interest has been recaptured thanks to some online reviews in a 1994 video game called Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, which, believe it or not, may give even Manos a run for its money. Released in 1994 by Kirin Entertainment, a division of Digital Stuff, Inc., for the unpopular 3DO system, it appears to bill itself as a pornographic comedy game, but it isn’t any of the three: it’s barely pornographic, barely comedic, and barely a game. The “game” is supposed to be a comedic story about a man and a woman and your goal is to get them together. Other than the intro, there is no motion in the entire game, and…well, it gets stranger from there.
Two reviewers gave their take on the “game” recently: James “Angry Nerd” Rolfe and The Game Heroes. And if you must, you can play a recreation of the game on YouTube. (Keep in mind that none of these links are safe for work- in part due to the content, in part due to the fact that your co-workers would be embarrassed to see you looking at this.)
There are so many questions Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties raises. Mainly, who thought this was a good idea? How did this even get published? Did anyone find this entertaining? In the end credits of the game, the producer is “jokingly” listed as “doing hard time” as a result of the game being made. Hopefully that turned out to be true.
Wow… that’s bad. There was a lot of crap for 3DO that tried to use the ‘video’ gimmick to horrible results. My friend actually had one at the time. The video scenes in The Horde with Kirk Cameron were kind of funny, though. Other games, like Twisted: The Game Show used the video feature pretty well.
How did this one slide under the radar for so long?
If we do consider this to be a game then it is certainly among the worst of the worst. The only other thing that I could possibly see giving it a run for its money is “Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing”.
Dear God, I watched the Angry Video Game Nerd’s review, and this game was seriously nothing more than some Hollywood cokeheads taking pictures from a wacky day out, loosely connecting the images to a story, and adding a bunch of unnecessary picture editing to make it seem more like a game. Or something.
“The ‘Manos’ of video games” is the perfect description for it.
Bwahaaaa that is awesome. ALthough I can’t decide whether the ‘spin your head, float into the air, and airplane dive into the ground 20 feet behind the other guy’ move, or the ‘invisible kneeling pervert touch their underwear from behind and insta-kill’ move is more awesomer.
It’s kinda like someone read a second hand description of what a “visual novel” game was and how it’d play, and tried to create their own version—with woefully inadequate tools, technology, and any comparable kind of craftsmanship or artistic skill. Like if a medieval blacksmith tried to build a gatling gun after seeing one in a photograph, or at a distance.
That’s it. The only logical explanation for a game that bad—time travel. Someone at that game publisher somehow got information about a popular game genre in the future, frighteningly screwed up technically replicating it, and then tried to sell it to the wrong market, and the wrong place in time.
Yep. When the only plausible way to explain your failure involves the warping of the space-time continuum, you chose the wrong profession.
Have you all honestly forgotten about Zombie Nation on the NES? A game where a giant disembodied head spits loogies at planes and helicopters controlled by zombies while attempting to kill an alien boss?
I was 9 when this game came out and I didn’t think video games as a medium would survive much longer because game makers were obviously out of ideas.
Nope. Let me take you back to the game industry of the early 1990’s. CD-ROM drives were becoming cheap enough to be a standard feature in computers, sound cards were finally standard, and the game industry was making money hand over fist thanks to some recent breakout mainstream hits like Myst.
Into this environment steps people with more money than sense coming from other entertainment industries. They said to themselves, “There’s no real difference between games and movies!” and proceed to make things that could be barely called “games”. They thought that there was novelty in having real people on screen (“photo realistic graphics!”) and most of them used the one existing commercially successful model for blending video sources and games: Dragon’s Lair. The result were a lot of games like Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties that were collectively refered to as “Interactive Movies”. Needless to say none of them were major successes and Hollywood money fled from gaming for another five year cycle where they pretended the industry didn’t exist.
Their descendants continue to exist in the quick time events that God of War revived and those visual novels. I’d be hard pressed to call Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties the worst of them; there’s just too many god awful ones to pick out a single “worst”.
Yeah, seriously. I just watched the reviews and I cried laughing. I made better movies as a 12-year-old. It is astonishingly terrible for any commercial product. I mean, they advertise “Pandas” and “Racecars” on the box… and it turns out that it’s random pictures of racecars during the credits, with a cut and pasted panda mascot put in to about five random slides of racecards and a guy sleeping. And by cut and pasted, I do mean that - complete with a huge outline of background from whatever picture it came from. The “death scene”… dear lord.
I am completely serious when I say that if I saw this as a schoolkid’s multimedia project I would have probably given them a B- at best due to the sloppiness and lack of effort. And that would be for a child, working with MS Paint and a webcam, let alone for a commercially produced console video game.
You’re a lot of fun at camp outs, swapping ghost stories and tall tales, aren’t ya?
But for the record, I maintain that PDWT was worse than even a standard “Interactive Movie”—and notable if not totally unique for it—for it’s main technical failings (like…not actually having a movie); and the peculiarly ribald, and occasionally surrealistic elements surely belie Japanese artistic influences, and in a manner that, if one is to maintain any hope of personal sanity or belief in a non-malevolent universe, can only be explained by time manipulation.
