One of the worst games ever made is coming to Steam, but we won't know how cruel this joke is until we see the price tag
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, a canonical "bad videogame" with a 1/10 review from GameSpot and 8/100 score on Metacritic, is set to be re-released on Steam some time between April and June this year.
The listing went live on March 22 according to SteamDB, and was subsequently shared to Twitter by popular gaming news account Wario64. Big Rigs' original developer, Stellar Stone, is credited on the page, with original publisher GameMill replaced by newcomer Margarite Entertainment.
In a pinned post on Big Rigs' Steam discussion page, Margarite wrote that it had acquired the rights to Big Rigs and a few other "classic" (their word) games. The post also addressed user concerns over how marketing materials for the game were sourced, promising better crediting in the future.
Lest you think this is some loving, Nightdive-style remaster into the game Big Rigs always should have been, it looks like a straight port of the 2003 original. The screenshots, Stellar Stone dev credit, and antediluvian system requirements all speak to a lack of touching up.
The question remains: Why? Big Rigs is Superman 64-tier as a shorthand for "bad game," a game that more people know of by reputation than actual experience. I've never tried it myself, but reviews and gameplay footage show a desolate wasteland of drab, turn of the millennium polygons, a fever dream of slippery driving with minimal context or reward, and that's before you get to the trove of game-breaking bugs.
GameSpot's 1/10 video review originally uploaded in 2004, an Angry Video Game Nerd retrospective in 2014, and the memetic dissemination of the game's apocalyptically pathetic "You're Winner" victory screen all cemented its legacy as this inexplicable flop we just love to hate.
This Steam re-release seems poised to cash in on a joke we've all been in on for 22 years and counting, introducing a new generation to Big Rigs' slapstick through streamers reacting to the game, and maybe even streamers reacting to other streamers reacting to the game. The price tag is going to determine whether I keep laughing come launch.
Big Rigs arguably has value as a longstanding internet institution and (even more arguably) an example of uncanny outsider art that sloughed off the games industry during a transitional period in the medium, but how does that translate to cash? "Free" would be my first choice for pricing, an act of preservationist goodwill to potentially draw attention to Margarite Entertainment's other, hopefully more worthwhile endeavors.
That's not likely though, So I'd say $2 is a price I'd still feel good about—$2 for a joke, I'd throw down that much for a whoopee cushion. Three bucks would be pushing it, and anything north of $5 would be a problem by my reckoning. The higher the price for this apparently bare-bones re-release, the more it will feel like one of those self-conscious "parodies" of campy '80s horror flicks than the real deal. We'll see where Big Rigs' re-release falls later this year.
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