Disaster Report: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (PC)

The year is 2003. A customer finds themselves in the Wal-Mart video game section, but for one reason or another, they’re not checking out the big name games. Perhaps their budget is tight or they’re just looking for a cheap game as a gift to a barely known relative, but whatever the reason, they are browsing the low cost PC games when their eyes fall upon it. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. That customer… doesn’t even spare it a second of thought, eyes scanning onward to more interesting titles. They can hardly be blamed for it, it’s not exactly a game name or concept that leaps out at you. Sure, the trailer truck ramming into a police car on the cover looks a bit exciting, but it’s probably sitting amidst other cheap racing games that promise sport cars and vehicles more fit for high speeds. If someone really wanted a quality racing game despite the expense, Nintendo’s 2003 was oddly stacked with racers thanks to Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Kirby Air Ride, and F-Zero GX. Other games in the cheap section already probably promise more unique experiences than this semi truck racer too, adventures of fantasy and treks through the impossible even achievable from companies on a limited budget. There’s very little reason for attention to fall on Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing in particular, so the customer continues browsing…

 

Completely unaware they’ve fallen directly into Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing’s trap.

You aren’t meant to buy Big Rigs. Wal-Mart already paid the creators for the copies, likely the almost self-aware GameMill Publishing getting whatever cash came out of this odd exclusivity deal. While a game that sells well would inspire a store to order more for sale, so long as it looks like a game and functions when you put it in the computer, that’s probably all the business side of things need to see for that initial set of games to be sold and delivered. Even if people did end up buying it, perhaps it was hoped it would just sit in someone’s collection gathering dust or that kids would play it for a few minutes and move onto something else without taking much time to really consider what they were playing.

 

What the world was hopefully not meant to notice was that Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is not a finished game. There are game demos with more content, an Early Access Steam game released in this state would be laughed at for thinking this was a palatable slice of a work in progress. Even video games cancelled early in their development can be more playable than what should be a simple truck racing game. Hyperbole is often the weapon of a humorist, but in the case of Big Rigs, this is a racing game without racing. Its a driving game where you can’t crash, unless you count the game crashing usually after a few races if you even get that far. It is literally a game released before it was done as admitted by an online patch later available for download that designates itself as the 1.0 release, which is typically what you call your finished product that’s shipped to consumers before any other updates.

 

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is the homework turned in at the last minute where the student couldn’t even be bothered to do something clever to hide they didn’t hit the page count. It’s a pizza delivery if the ingredients arrived in the box uncooked, and some still aren’t even there. It’s a bridge that wasn’t built to cover the full length of the gap it was meant to cross, making it essentially pointless. What that hypothetical customer in 2003 didn’t realize was this generic looking truck racer was certainly not the best game they could have grabbed by a long shot, but it might be one of the most interesting because of how monumentally it fails by being an unrepentant incomplete experience plopped onto game discs to make a quick buck.

 

“DRIVING” IN BIG RIGS

So, let’s imagine this customer has somehow decided their home needs an injection of sixteen-wheeler racing more than any other possible interactive electronic experience. Maybe they decided to look at the back of the box, and some of it sounded a bit exciting despite the simple premise. After all, this game promises 4 big rigs truck with trailers!

 

…There are four trucks in the game, but there are only two with trailers, and even the ones that do have them join the others in sharing an interesting visual glitch where the rear headlights don’t technically glow but the lights that are meant to be there tend to float in a space within the trailer or behind the vehicle like it is always playing catch-up. In fact, this glitch seems to more reliably arise on the rigs that live up to the box’s claim, so perhaps headlights that project onto thin air is just part of the job for these truckers.

 

Maybe instead what lured this player in was the promise of “3 levels with a variety of wicked challenges” which is not a phrase I understand even after playing it. There are five tracks to select for racing as well as two modes, Custom Race that lets you pick your truck and track and then Random Race which probably wouldn’t even deserve to be called a mode if it wasn’t one of the options on the main menu insisting it’s a special feature to just pick those two things for a player. The box does speak of a police roadblocks though, and that front cover does show a semi ramming into a cop car, surely as part of some exciting conflict between a lawless trucker and the law trying to keep him down! The box even talks about delivering loads, managing gas, and earning points!

 

There are no cops. There are no points. There are no loads in the trailer. There is no gas mechanic. I’d even try to refute the box’s claims you drive routes through “Desert, Forest, Plains, and Cities”, but the locations you find yourself in might technically count as these even if “route” is a generous way to describe these barren circuits. The point is, any idea this is anything but a racer is a lie, and while there might have been hopes of it being more, that isn’t the game that was ultimately made and released. …Although perhaps calling it a racing game is also a lie, because not only is this game impossible to play with other people, but the one other vehicle that you can compete with on the track actually isn’t competing against you at all.

 

When you find yourself on the starting line, another big rig will be sitting next to your ride of choice (or your randomly selected one, which is such an exciting bit of randomness despite there being no difference in how the trucks control or move!). When this so-called race kicks off though, you’ll notice something about that other truck, and that is it seemingly did not get the message the race has begun. In the original release version of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, the opposing truck, the only form of competition in this game, couldn’t move. It sits idle on the starting line, perhaps unwilling to participate in this farce. That 1.0 patch I mentioned does breathe life into this truck though, but once it actually starts driving, its ultimate fate is perhaps even sadder than just sitting there unable to move. The truck will indeed drive the road in 1.0, and when it reaches the finish line… it refuses to cross. It sits in its old starting position, once again still as a statue, still not able to indulge the idea this is some competitive race between human and machine.

 

So, with an opponent unwilling and unable to participate due to the cosmic forces of an uncaring universe that did not program in any way for it to win, you are left to your own devices. You can, perhaps, delude yourself into considering this a time challenge. There is a ticking clock, even if the numbers don’t fit in the boxes in the top left, so maybe you can try to make this about setting the best time instead! You take off down the road, the actual driving so basic and easy you should have no trouble following the course to the checkpoints along its length. Your ULTRANAV beneath the timer, while unexplained, tracks which checkpoints you’ve hit, and if you pass through checkpoints out of order, you will still get credit for them, but you’ll also accrue penalty time, something that might matter if your score was tracked at all. That High Scores section on the main menu is also a lie, unless you count the scores of that opposing racer who isn’t event technically racing. Oddly, the only scores I ever saw registered in the High Scores table were the same few that were actually the completion time for the other driver across the different tracks, a new one added and completely identical with each new race that reached completion. This may make it sound like the other racer is actually participating since they can set scores and you can’t, but if you do hit all the checkpoints and cross the finish line in these 1 lap races, you’ll see undeniable proof that you won.

See? Such a majestic golden trophy could only possibly go to the person who truly won this challenge. You can’t just say “You’re Winner” to someone who didn’t win, but you probably wouldn’t say it in general either. Maybe for a second it might not click in your mind why You’re Winner is an incorrect thing to say. It’s just a contraction of You Are Winner, right? Which should be You Are The Winner, or You Are A Winner, or even just Winner possibly.

 

Already racing against a negligible opponent in a race you can’t lose would be a hollow victory, but as if it was some participation award shoved into a kid’s hands to make them feel like they did something, you get this plain golden trophy and an unconvincing grammar mistake telling you that you actually did so well. It actually brings to mind an old memory of mine from when I was in Scouts, a young boy competing in the Pinewood Derby. I spent the time sanding and designing my little wooden car, but then the day of the contest came and only one other boy showed. I got first place, but as I got my trophy, I found myself crying. The winner was crying, and it wasn’t out of joy. It was because I wanted to race with a bunch of other people, regardless of how well I did, to have a competition where our efforts mattered. I do feel bad for that other scout who got second and was putting on a good show smiling despite his placement, but now I imagine some poor truck loving kid who might have got this game as a gift, their relative spending hard earned cash to get someone something they thought they’d enjoy, and that kid sees that You’re Winner trophy and realizes the absolutely hollow state of the game they had pinned their hopes on for even a modicum of fun.

 

1.0 patched that message to say “You Win!” at least, which lacks in any fun flavor or character but at least wouldn’t warrant comment compared to a message that was created without even the second of afterthought needed to realize maybe an error was made.

 

So, that is the “”””racing”””” in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, where you don’t even go “over the road” since that’s a term used for long haul deliveries that usually send truckers cross-country. However, I did mention five tracks, and to continue to get a deeper look at how little care was put into this experience, it feels vital to take a tour across those courses and see where more and more corners were cut in getting this game to retail.

 

5* ROADS TO GO OVER

So, you’re in your truck, listening to the complete absence of music, only the sound of your engine as company unless you try to abruptly reverse and want to hear the ear-splitting shriek of your brakes. Where do you find yourself going?

 

The first course on offer is Devil’s Passage 1, your first taste of racing on a night road. You take off, and as you head down the track probably the first thing you’ll notice is a lot of the road itself isn’t rendered very well. A fair bit ahead parts of it are missing and you see the dirt beneath, and when you approach only some of them will load in the actual street. This display issue is common across the tracks and gives the road a very worn out appearance, although since it’s not consistent and the cut out parts are caused by flickering, it is not some artistic touch in a game where such thought doesn’t really exist anyway. Continuing to drive, you’ll notice some buildings off to the side of the road. Perhaps you decide to ram into them just to feel something, but as your vehicle barrels towards them… it continues barreling right through them, unimpeded, undamaged. The buildings have no collision whatsoever, this also true of the other vehicle quietly waiting on the starting line and most any object you can see in this game world. When I said there is no crashing in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, I meant there is pretty much no object that can even be touched. The only thing in this place that your vehicle comes in contact with is the ground beneath your wheels, and that seems to be one relationship the game will absolutely not allow you to break away from. There are mountains all around you, so maybe you now decide to test what happens if you go uphill.

There is no traction in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing… or maybe, it might be scientific to say there is perfect traction? Your truck drives up mountainsides with the same skill and lack of resistance as flat roads. It does not matter if your vehicle ends up going completely vertical, if you are racing along the side so you are practically perpendicular with the surface. Your truck is stickier than Spider-Man and has no idea what the word friction means. It will glide across all surfaces equally, almost like a ghost in this world but without the power of flight… unless you count some intense off-roading. While going off the track does not lead to any roughage or impediment to your speed, if you keep going past those mountains, you can enter the void. You drive off into the empty sky, nothing beneath you and the sky exposed for a sham. You are technically still driving on a surface, it’s completely invisible but your truck still adheres to some idea of ground, but that ground can go in all sorts of unexpected directions. Maybe huge valleys exist, you won’t know until you drive off into the unknown, but you can always drive back to the course later. Maybe you can even use the mountains and void to shave some time off your race to get to checkpoints more quickly.

 

Devil’s Passage 1 is just the testing ground though. You will notice the literally hollow immaterial buildings, and some strange sights like large pipes in the air that connect to nowhere should you follow them. Boot up Devil’s Passage 2 though and you’ll find yourself… in Devil’s Passage again, but in reverse. You can tell because there is one really odd asset, a heavily destroyed helicopter, that was at the end of the first track but now is near to the start for this one. You need such a landmark mainly because the courses are pretty generic otherwise, but this reverse along the road also seems to come with some new spots to drive through at least, mainly that area that with the pipes now reveals its secret. These are actually meant to connect to the top of a building. They still don’t, but it at least looks like there was the idea it would attach to the roof of this now present building, although apparently populating this area with new models for this second version of the track came at a price. Near to the pipe building is a convenience store and gas station, but they are half buried in dirt seemingly because the game literally cannot place buildings on anything but flat ground so any extra elevation added to it will just clip through the structures instead.

 

Devil’s Passage 1 and 2 reuse the same space, and since you can drive anywhere and take checkpoints in any order since penalty time means nothing they will feel pretty similar, but Forgotten Road 1 provides a tantalizing change of pace. Not only is there not a Forgotten Road 2 (presumably it was forgotten), but right at the start of the track we see two new things. First, we see a singular lamp post ahead of the starting line. Try to contain your excitement. It is actually an oddity though, because while there are other lamp posts in this game, this one is particularly strange in that it has a bright blue, white, and purple mix to its shading. It is the type of coloration that implies something went wrong with its design rather than being an intentional choice, this vapor wave light even more unusual because it is the only one of its kind and it is right in front of the starting line where you would think someone would see it and fix its coloration. Maybe they just thought it was pretty and didn’t want to remove it.

Moving on from that lovely landmark, you see something even more interesting: a bridge. You take off towards it, and when you reach the edge of it, you disappear. You did not teleport, and considering the game’s state, you also didn’t suddenly lose your car or turn invisible. Continue driving, and you might realize what has happened. The camera keeps moving onward like nothing is happening, but then your rig drives up through the ground, revealing you had actually completely ignored the bridge and drove down through the valley it was meant to help you cross. Like the buildings, the bridge is merely decorative, impossible to touch and failing at its single function. If you do stop after you drive down through it you can spot your truck in the little valley, but it is at least a little impressive they programmed the camera view to continue on as if something impossible and physics defying wasn’t happening below.

 

We’ve already gotten the gift of a weird lamp and false bridges, but Forgotten Road 1 still has more to give. Continue driving forward, and you’ll find yourself driving through a small village. If this was a racing game and if objects had collision, this could be an area where you can decide which split in the road to take and worry about hitting a fountain, but instead, it’s somewhere you can just drive on through, literally, nothing can stop you. What might give you pause though is the strangest sight in the game thus far. Near the exit of the little hamlet is a human.

This is the only human in the game. The trucks have no drivers and I feel like I don’t need to say a game this slapdash is lacking in pedestrians, but this lone figure stands, arms to his side in the default model T-pose, completely tan in coloration like the enemy side in a bucket of toy soldiers. Near him, a tan car that looks a bit like it would be fit for a disappointing Pinewood Derby also exists. Perhaps these were the start of a doomed idea of adding more to the tracks, people and cars that could add some character or even driving hazards an idea that maybe never took off when it became clear this game was being pushed out in an unfinished state. In a bit of a baffling discovery in the game’s files, unused textures for a human character exist, but rather than being some generic figure, they appear to depict Shamil Basayev, a leader of a Chechen insurgency responsible for multiple hostage situations and bombings. The game was supposedly developed in Eastern Europe, likely Ukraine or Russia, so it’s hard to say what the intention of using a politicized figure like him for reference was, but the game also has an unused texture in the files for a billboard featuring a woman’s bare bottom with the words “for the WINNERS” on it so it could be the programmers who couldn’t finish a game spent some of that time throwing in edgy elements before it got packaged for a safer Wal-Mart release.

 

Whatever the reason, Forgotten Road 1 has left us with many questions even before we go off the road and find a wide river filled not with water, but flickering texture triangles that look like holes through the world instead. Driving in this area of course will not impede your invincible ghost truck, but as you drive the exact texture issue will continue to flicker like some sort of disappointing single color kaleidoscope. However, it’s time to move onto the next course, Nightride.

 

There is no Nightride.

 

It’s on the level select screen, sure. It even has a picture that seems to promise driving downtown in a bustling metropolitan setting, the multistory urban towers a promising change in pace visually from the empty spaces dotted with occasional buildings. Click on Nightride though, and you will crash the game. Try and try as you might, Nightride cannot be reached… but that 1.0 release won’t crash. For a moment, you may get excited, and while you start in a space that looks a lot like the other tracks, maybe you just need to get passed the wide open spaces with smatterings of structures to get to the real city. However, then you start seeing things you recognize. The fort on the hill, the pipes in the air, the damaged helicopter… you’re in Devil’s Passage 2 again. Nightride doesn’t exist, so if you select it, the game throws you into another course and hopes you won’t notice. This makes three levels technically set in the same space, and while I did get a glitch once where the track didn’t load in for a bit so maybe the absence of ground might obscure this fact for a bit, this does mean we’re sorely lacking in unique driving spaces.

The final track comes in swinging though with something that does feel different. Small Town Road has you start in small town, and while it usually goes without saying, it wasn’t lying about you being on a road, but it actually feels a bit like at first there’s more to the idea. There are buildings on your left and right to make it feel more like you’re within a town rather than a building cluster, there are plenty of street lamps and crosswalks… but then you start driving. The buildings are the first to go, replaced to large piles of dirt on either side of the road, and while they’re meant to block your view, it’s not too hard to see the open expanse of the void between these hills. You’re out of the town and now on the road, but as you drive, you’ll notice the decorations have gotten quite repetitive. As if realizing the sparse open spaces of other tracks were getting egregious, Small Town Road is cluttered with the same repeating objects. Street signs are so abundant that sometimes random ones are stuck in the middle of the street. Bus stop shelters are placed on either side of the road over and over, a hypothetical bus likely barely able to even get going before it reaches another one. There are actually 154 bus stops in total along this singular looping street making for possibly the least efficient use of public transport imaginable, especially when many of these bus stops are out in the middle of the dirt piles of no apparent purpose besides hemming in the street. Despite the track quickly turning into a boring trek between the soil mounds, this small town did invest in two reproductions of the Arc de Triomphe back to back along this empty stretch of road. That isn’t me being colorful in describing some large arches either, the textures, while hard to make out, can at least be identified as trying to depict the intricate statue work found on the Paris monument to the fallen soldiers of various French wars. Whether this small town had big aspirations of being the next Vegas or only knew how to design one type of arch it’s hard to say, but considering these are also intangible and aren’t large enough to even block your view of the road for a second, they’re just an inexplicable bit of color in the bus stop capital of the world.

 

Now that you’ve seen the tracks and heard about the racing, you might wonder what is left in this small driving game. There is one huge topic left untouched though, one that requires us to go way back to when I only briefly brushed across a mechanic you wouldn’t even think warrants mention…

 

GOING WAY, WAY BACK…

Reversing. In most driving games, a means of pulling yourself back after a collision to get back on track. Maybe you’ll adjust where your vehicle’s pointing with it sometimes as well, especially in racing games with goals beyond winning, but it’s the kind of standard mechanic that doesn’t even warrant mention since it is so straightforward, standard, and unassuming despite having an important role.

 

So far, I only mentioned the way this mostly quiet game assaults your eardrums if you try to reverse while driving. However, if you reverse from a standstill, things get interesting.

 

First, it’s just a cute touch that your speedometer will list the numbers in the negative. Normally, you can drive up to 60 mph in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, but as you start to reverse, you notice your acceleration increasing, the number going well below negative sixty and it just keeps going. The reverse speed is increasing exponentially.

Your truck is now rocketing through the world, hugging its every contour and yet still only increasing in velocity. You’ve likely left earth by now, off in that featureless emptiness as your truck long ago would have broken the sound barrier if there had been much sound to break. The numbers won’t stop climbing. Your truck now appears to be tumbling about as it drives across surfaces that do not have physical form. The big rig is a blur, if you try to spin in a circle, it will rotate so quickly that it feels like you can see every angle on it all at once. You might sometimes find yourself briefly back in the level before rocketing off again, space possibly looping over itself as it tries to contain this truck that, if you devoted the time to hold down that down arrow, would eventually break past the speed of light, at least according to the speedometer. Those three green numbers that are constantly displaying in the bottom left, likely some leftover information from the debugging process that a player isn’t meant to say, hit enormous numbers as they struggle to indicate your ever evolving X, Y, and Z axis position.

Then, you let go of the down arrow.

 

And the truck immediately stops like nothing had happened at all.

Reversing defies understanding in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The programmer put in no cap to how fast it can go, and yet they also didn’t program in any sort of easing down from the speed it reached. The forward driving is functional and fine for a game with literally no obstacles to oppose you or turns that require any amount of skill to take, but reversing shows that wondrous miracles lie within this sloppy rush job. It is, admittedly, something you can get your fill of in a few minutes. Going super speed across multiple tracks only gives you different skyboxes really, and even as a bad game tourist, I saw most of what was worth seeing in this game before reaching 1 hour of playtime with most of it being playing with this reverse glitch to see if it had further depths. However, this glitch may be what puts Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing over many other awful games, the kind of idea that feels too weird and inexplicable to make up as an issue with a video game’s design. It’s that important cherry on top that adds some whimsy and excitement to a game that might have been mostly full of plain underwhelming issues and glitches for a player otherwise. It is, I daresay, a point where the game can be fun for a moment, but a sadly transient bit of enjoyment and not the kind you’re enjoying for the right reasons. This is why this awful game has any sort of legacy, and speaking of…

 

THE ROAD TO “REDEMPTION”?

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing has become infamous, not only because reviewers at the time found it and awarded it some rare bottom of the barrel scores even from outlets usually afraid to rate anything below a 4 out of 10, but because others found the hilarity in its issues strong enough to want to see others experience it on Youtube. It’s a game that probably would have been forgotten if it worked properly and honestly would still not be too notable if it was just awful and didn’t have weird elements like the warp speed reversing, but the game’s status as one of the worst games ever made meant copies of it were going for a decent chunk of change despite this originally being a budget title. People had to see this truckwreck up close, its issues fascinating to gawk at, but the story got an even weirder wrinkle when 22 years after release…

 

Somehow, Big Rigs returned.

When Margerite Entertainment Franchise announced they had the rights and were releasing it on Steam for $5.99, many people couldn’t believe it, to the point it was questioned whether they even had the legal go-ahead to do so. It came out though, and while it does contain the 1.0 release rather than that much worse original, you still get to see all of the most infamous issues for yourself. Now, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is not the name to pass up, but a game to grab because you know you’re in for a bad time. You’ll probably realize it’s pretty sparse on content quickly though, despite what laughs you might gain from picking apart its issues, but this Steam release isn’t just the game as we know it. Some elements were added, particularly if you download the free “YOU’RE WINNER” DLC and install it. This allows you to get the 1.0 release as well as one with some incredible new features such as music and collision.

 

Seeing the game selling its five track set of generic music as a $1.99 soundtrack feels like it is truly trying to trick players, but the game itself is functional (in as much as Big Rigs has ever been) and the YOU’RE WINNER DLC adds an interesting look at an alternate version of the game that could have existed. Weirdly, adding collision into the game comes with the side effect of the curbs being solid, meaning in a place like Small Town Road you can’t go off-road at all since that single lip of concrete is too much for your wheels that are far large than it to clear. This DLC does add in elements from Midnight Race Club: Supercharged!, another title developed by Big Rigs’s creators Stellar Stone that was a bit less of a disaster. Mostly that means motorcycles and other vehicles get added, although if you do race against them you’ll see many of them don’t so much drive as have their position updated in a jittery way that makes it look like they’re moving in a really fast slideshow. If you choose to play as them, you also get to experience this nauseating effect firsthand, motorcycle racing practically unbearable because of a camera that would be calmer if it was in the middle of an earthquake. Curiously, after playing as the motorcycle, my entire game seems to be corrupted with this jackhammering of the camera no matter what vehicle I play as and even if I uninstall the DLC or the entire game, meaning I may need to do a full purge to be free of this issue that is somehow worse than anything the original Big Rigs release had.

Steam Achievements can be earned through the DLC as well, and while most will be earned without much thought, there is also a large set of Achievements that will just pop up every few seconds as you play. There’s an achievement named for every letter of the alphabet and every single digit number, this Achievement spam usually found in low effort Steam titles to try and “reward” players who bought games that were not really meant to be played…

 

Which makes them perfect for a predecessor to that kind of awful game design ethos!

 

I had thought this DLC might try to “fix” the game and make it into a functional racer, but it is just a weird set of additional features that alter the awfulness but don’t seem to be trying to improve it much. In fact, adding in solid walls that prevent exploratory driving could be said to make it even worse, especially since they prevent you from achieving ludicrous speeds with your reversing thanks to all too common crashes with the environment. The actual game crashing is seemingly retained even with the DLC though, and while this addition works as something extra to get a bit more about this already poorly considered purchase, I would say if YOU’RE WINNER’s elements were standard, this would actually be worse than the original game since it would have removed what odd incomplete charm the non-functioning systems had.

 

This is certainly no redemption in the end, you’d basically have to make a new game out of it to try and even get it close to only being a little bad, but its reappearance and ease of access is one of those things that warms a preservationist’s heart. More and more older games regardless of their quality get to return from their digital graves, and while most want a chance to play the best of the best that were hard to acquire, getting to boot up the worst of the worst on modern hardware with ease gives you a fuller picture of what video games can be, even if its just how bad a game can get when it’s released prematurely and already designed with little love or creativity.

 

A “FOND” FAREWELL

I suppose I should at some point say why Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is atrocious rather than delighting at the absurdity of its failures. It’s a racing game where your only opponent isn’t even competing and there are no true obstacles to your driving since you can go across any surface and through any wall or barrier. The game will stop working regularly, most of the tracks are barren and boring before you factor in the physics issues, and even the strange glitches like the infinitely increasing speed when reversing your truck won’t hold your attention long. It’s a game thrown together hastily and not even with much thought for how bad it looks or how well things run, and while it may be fascinating in an anthropological sort of way that people thought it was possible to release a game this awful and get away with it, the humor of owning this disaster is short-lived.

 

Admittedly, I am the type of person who is absolutely overjoyed to finally have my hands on this famously terrible video game, but it’s akin to how someone who like architecture might find value in examining rubble. I enjoy the window into the mind video games can provide, an interactive space that realizes imagination and creativity. However, a game as poorly made as Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing also provides its own special perspective, a look at ideas half-baked, at errors and oversights made when a product only needs to look presentable for maybe three seconds to show the game is functional enough to be sold. It isn’t the same as a development story or a prototype or really the same as seeing a fully-fledged game, this in-between experience that feels closer to a reality show like Nailed It! where the contestants don’t have the time needed to properly make something and end up rushing, making errors, or finding weird compromises to put together something that technically holds together for the judges.

 

At the same time though, I mentioned those Steam games earlier with Achievement spam that are often sold not as games, but as low effort projects that slip by because they offer something outside the actual substance of the game to add some sort of value. They are the unfortunate cynical underbelly to this tale, the reminder that games like these, while sometimes funny or wonderfully absurd, are not some circus sideshow designed to entertain with its oddity. This was an effort to get money through deception, an incomplete game thrown together for an easy payday from unsuspecting suckers. Margarite Entertainment earns a pass since it made no effort to hide it is rereleasing a famously awful game, playing into the joke and making it so people knew what they were getting into. GameMill Publishing and Stellar Stone though released this game in an awful state back in 2003 and only lucked into the fact it’s a funny punching bag. I do not rate awful games higher than they deserve just because you might find the flaws amusing, by doing so you all but guarantee people will see only the rating and be tricked into buying a game that is far worse than that score implied. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is an undeniable disaster of design, perhaps more than most games under the Disaster Report umbrella here at The Game Hoard if we treat the word “disaster” a bit more literally rather than just as a means of judging poor choices in game structure and concept. At the same time, it’s hardly the worst game ever made because it’s a fairly lean experience and asks very little of you to experience it. No matter how you slice it though, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is unequivocally deserving of its reputation, a monument to how a video game can fail to come together worthy of its own pair of arches along a small town road.