The argument of art has come up time and again when it comes to video games, but I don’t think it’s ever been given serious weight because of the position many take. When it comes to expressing “art,” many tend to focus on the beauty and the emotional response of wonder, heartbreak, and love. That’s all well and good, but how many times have you seen art and been offended? How many paintings or performance pieces have you confused, disgusted, and sometimes outraged? Art can swing the other way, and the expressionism that creates these negative emotions are just as valid, if not sometimes moreso, than the positive. Read into that what you will as we dive into Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition.

By all means, raise your eyebrows and scratch your heads as you realize that Limited Run Games spent money and manpower to bring to modern consoles what has been argued as one of the worst games of all times. A title that is synonymous with the failings of multiple things at once: the lies of marketing campaigns, the strange obsession with mixing sex with video games in the 90s, and the 3DO itself, a curious console that deserves a deep dive at some point. Very often, we have games from yesteryear that, when brought under the modern lens, are found to be painful and clunky, only kept in the zeitgeist by the nostalgic framing of childhood’s joy. By contrast, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties was a failure in its own heyday, selling next to nothing and being remembered by none.

You might be wondering about the plot of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition, and there is one, in the broadest use of the word. A romantic encounter between two people, Jane and John are young, attractive, and tragically single. Hounded by their parents to hurry up and settle down, they have a chance encounter as Jane heads in to her first day at a new job. Sparks…fly? Well, they certainly interact, and then the game moves forward with the entire weirdness that is this game. And by weirdness, I mean wildly, deeply awful stereotypes about everyone, everything, and all you could imagine.

The interaction of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties is like if a visual novel got too lazy to even ask the player to do much. You’ll sit through an especially long dialogue between some people and then, eventually, be given two or three choices. You then choose one and…that’s it. There’s the right choice and then the wrong ones, and going the “wrong” way results in a deduction of points and the option to go back and try again or start over. As this is a game from the 90s, points were all the rage, and the most superfluous way to keep people playing. A theoretical high score comes from memorizing the best pathway through and getting John and Jane together without any major hiccups. No hidden endings to speak of, just two California stereotypes falling in love.

One of the major flaws of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties is the brutally awful presentation. Everything, including an introduction video from Jane, makes you think you’ll be playing FMV, but it’s actually a series of still photos with video piped over them. These stills vary in quality, filter, and sanity. Sometimes you’ll have a view point of someone who’s talking and the picture’s clear enough to know for certain who it is. Sometimes it’s a blurry snapshot of action and a person actually said “Yes, that’s good enough to be in a video game people will pay money for.” The photos are sometimes inverted in contrast or overexposed, and sometimes we just have what looks like 90s clipart blown up to fill the screen. It’s truly baffling.

Somehow, there was also next to no decisions to look into continuity for how the game progresses. John and Jane are all over the place when they get placed for photos, resulting in weird movements from people shifting in perspective and distance, despite almost no change in the conversation. Jane can’t remember if she was wearing a jacket between two moments, so her clothes will arbitrarily disappear and reappear. At one point, she clearly is going into the men’s room to hide, but the person chasing her goes into the women’s room to find her. That’s…this is all done in stills. You could have just taken another photo! 

The audio is its own disaster, and it cannot be overstated how jarring and weird it all is. The actors have lines they read in different rooms of echo quality and seem to have done the minimal number of takes required. The passion and emotion is devoid here, often coming across somewhere between a middle school play and a manic episode. John and Jane run so hot and cold with each other that my Nintendo Switch had a seizure. This is all set against some of the loudest, most discordant music possible, feeling like the producers gave one word prompts to the composer, who quickly cobbled together experimental visions of rockabilly, Back to the Future lost tracks, and the one after school special where Jessie took caffeine pills.

Generally speaking, I try not to spoil games too often when I’m reviewing them. I want people to discover the funny moments, the poignant lines, the shocking twists, and the grandiose endings as they occur. I want my review to give you just enough to intrigue you and make sure you dive in and experience all the moments I did firsthand so you can appreciate and decide for yourself what it’s all about. What is the massive conclusion of Anonymous;CODE? What amazing hijinks did the Frog Detective get up to? Tantalization and purposely leaving out keystones keeps this from just being a website dedicated to spoiling every game and saving you the purpose of playing it.

The fact that Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties comes with the same warnings at the beginning as the incredibly racist Looney Tunes animations should give you some warning as to what to expect, and even then you can still be shocked by it. Jane is hypersexualized from the very beginning, complete with constantly having her breasts out, a full on shower scene, and having a route where she ends up in dominatrix gear at work. John, not to be ignored as an idiot beefcake, has tons of nude shots during his introduction and then stays in at least a t-shirt for the remainder of the game, though that’s probably because the producers wanted to exploit Jeanne Basone (who plays Jane) as much as possible. 

If it was just sexual depravity, that wouldn’t be a big issue; after all, I’ve covered more than enough anime games already this year that hit those same notes. It’s the way it’s handled that comes across as even more shocking. John has to assure his mom he isn’t gay because he doesn’t have a girlfriend (much to her relief). Jane’s father demands she get married and start pumping out babies, but also that no one ever touch his little girl. The only way to progress the story is to allow the boss to sexually harass you and then have John white knight his way into Jane’s pants. And those are just the parts that are ACTUALLY part of the story.

Where we cross the line of bad game into artfully bad in Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties is the decisions made throughout. We have a narrator who constantly attacks your motives and abilities to find a date, often while wearing some kind of outfit or uniform that has NOTHING to do with the action on the screen. John and Jane both engage in “what if” fantasies that cause them to switch characters and races, often at the behest of baffling ideals of what would make this relationship happen. The choices, while clear, invite the player to discover what would happen if they take the wrong turn because you can never guess what’ll happen next. We even have a second narrator come in to replace the first one, and then the first one comes back and murders the new narrator. It’s like an Adult Swim film, but without Rob Heubel.

And the violence against women! There isn’t just one, but TWO scenes where a man tries to kill a woman because she rejected his advances! To be fair, the women both survive (and the first one disarms the man after saying “White men can’t use knives”), but holy crap, that was the accepted nomenclature of the 90s! People wonder why women are scared and suspicious of men in the current dating scene: it’s because we were raised on games where it was hilarious to chase a woman with a letter opener across ALL of Los Angeles because she wouldn’t have sex with you! Yes, this wasn’t a popular game, but it was made and more than one person said “Perfect, that’s hilarious and relatable.”

But here’s the thing. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition doesn’t exist because Limited Run Games’ has a fetishism for hurting the industry. It’s because they can see what lies beneath the surface, and that thing is the very real artistic power of this title. It’s incredibly evocative and gets different emotions and feelings going from the very beginning. There isn’t a decent person alive right now who can play this game without getting at least moments of discomfort and disbelief from the words and choices that come out of the character’s mouths. While the characters are far from irredeemable (except the boss), they aren’t pleasant or fun to be around, which is such a choice that I can barely believe.

Also, it’s clear the game lives in infamy and those involved still acknowledge and even appreciate the thing they made. Jeanne Basone appears in the intro of the Definitive Edition, poking fun at her original intro and even recording a complete commentary track for the game. This is probably one of the least important entries in her career as a proud GLOW member and having roles in multiple TV shows and movies, but she is on board to recognize her work and that of those who participated. There’s a moment in the game where John flubs a line, the entire crew laughs and they keep the blooper in the main game. That’s such an incredible choice.

Limited Run Games also made sure to keep things engaging within this remaster. Besides the fact that they had to port a 3DO game onto multiple systems, they built an entire backbone that allows players to jump to any scene at any time, including the bizarre, dead end moments. There’s the option to add or remove some of the grit in the photos that would have been apparent in the original, but none of the options completely clean up the awful photography, and thank heavens. If I could clearly see the sheer amount of questionable paraphernalia in Jane’s father’s home, I would assume he had a laundry list of crimes that Jane is trying to distance herself from.

There are also deleted scenes (sadly, just unused stills) and additional videos to unlock (like the aforementioned commentary) that come from the separate mini game Plumb the Depths. Here, players must move through a 90s style FPS, collecting plungers and using the cash they earned playing through the main game to unlock the bonus content. There’s no map and navigation can be hard, and the player is stalked by shambling sprites of Jane’s Boss, who can appear from any direction at any time. While a single plunger can fight him off, the player moves slowly and awkwardly, so you can be surprised and have your progress halted. It’s janky and confusing, a perfect companion to the main game.

If this was a straight and dirty port of the original Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, I naturally could not recommend it. It’s boring, it slogs, it’s almost absurdly offensive and it hurts the eyes and ears to behold the game as it is (not to mention it’s permanently in stereo, no mono options). But this Definitive Edition locks in on what it truly is: an artifact of games and attempts from a time where many companies were making successes and legendary titles that stood the test of time. Samurai Showdown, NBA Jam, Secret of Mana, were all released in 1993 and were massive hits. Riverhill Mystery Selection: Manhattan Requiem proves actual visual novels could be released in 1993 and still hit. Hell, the release of Night Trap the year before proves that this could have been an FMV, and yet it still wasn’t.

People do not watch The Room or Kentucky Fried Movie because they are on the same level as Schindler’s List. They do it because those two movies are awful to the point of hilarity. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties isn’t just bad, it’s awful, and that’s precisely why it needs to be preserved. It’s a time capsule of bad decisions and cocaine, of when something so offensive just flew under everyone’s radar and could have died in obscurity if it wasn’t found by a YouTube channel and blown up online. This is a piece of video game history and artifice that should not be forgotten. You know it’s bad, you may have even seen it’s bad, but, until you play it with your own two hands, I don’t think you can truly state and attest “this game is bad.” 

Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition is a brave, admirable release, and I implore Limited Run Games to continue to do the diligence of not simplifying video game history. Some are good, some are bad, and some are ugly. This one just happens to be as bad as they come, and that’s amazing. Don’t pretend to like it, it won’t win you any awards. But you can appreciate it and the mission to keep it known, and that, in and of itself, is worth investing in.

Final Verdict: 8.0

Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.
A copy of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition was provided by the publisher.