It’s like an Indiana Jones movie, except the artifact is a steaming pile of shit with no discernible value to anyone. So basically, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Among the many infamously bad games ever made, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties stands apart. Hell, calling it a game is being charitable. It’s more like a powerpoint presentation with shitty, sub-par softcore porn dialog read by bargain basement acting students with no talent or learned ability. It was known for it’s notable lack of quality on the 3DO, a system so overpriced and under performing, the best parts of its library were mostly multiplatform after the fact. It was such a piece of shit, the Angry Video Game Nerd did a review of the 3DO version, which I’d imagine to be most people’s introduction to the game:
But the best part of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties for me? Nearly half of its video pictures were shot less than 6 blocks from the apartment building I grew up in. The fountain (yes, singular) they shot several of the “how dare you enjoy the shitty softcore porn we shot” scenes in front of? Right in front of an Olive Garden at the base of an office building, though the fountain was remodeled in the late 90’s-early 2000’s, so it doesn’t look like that anymore. The brick alleyway the dude wore a chicken mask in, which also has the bronze statue of Benjamin Franklin sitting on a bench? Right next to a Mexican restaurant my Mom liked that wound up mismanaged into the ground around 2010-2011 or so. It’s literally across the street from the theater I took my little brother to see Finding Nemo. I could probably go on.
But this doesn’t concern me; rather, it’s about a man on a treasure hunt for something rare and mostly worthless. A PC version of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. A mention by a single UK game magazine is what put psychoticgiraffe on the case. Specifically, one he read via the Lost Media Wiki., which he was browsing to find obscure Windows 95 games to test out an old laptop. Google didn’t help much; all the results pointed back to the much more common 3DO version. So he decided to, instead, search by the system requirements given in the PC Gamer UK review. That took him to the WorldCat database; and in the 72,000 registered libraries across the world, only one turned up with a copy: Ball State University.
psychoticgiraffe doesn’t live in Indiana, but he needed to get his hands on this stinky gold before someone realized that they had a copy of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties and cast it into the fires of Mount Doom. So, with a little help from redditor Immyers12, he was able to secure what may well be the last existing copy of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties for the PC. And thanks to that, he was able to rip the disc and setup a DOSBox emulator to run the game on modern computers (yes, even a modern potato could probably run this game), which you can get in full here.
The game may be obviously bad. But, it has its place in the history of terrible FMV games. Mostly because it utterly failed at the whole FMV part of the equation. And its final act was in sore need of Yakkety Sax. But next time you think you got ripped off paying for a bad game, just remember that, back in the day, it cost people well over $700 for the privilege to play Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. And Gex, I guess.
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