An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.

Last week with the PS1, we looked at the June 1996 PS1 releases of Top Gun: Fire At Will!, V-Tennis, A-Train, and Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball.

Last time with the 3DO, we continued into 1994 by looking at Soccer Kid, Family Feud, John Madden Football, Jurassic Park Interactive, and Shock Wave.

Now, we begin our descent into the deepest, darkest corner of early 90s gaming by looking at Road Rash, Alone in the Dark, Trip'd (turns out Trip'd came out in '95, whoopsie), Way of the Warrior, Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.

**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**

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Road Rash

Developer: Monkey Do Productions

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Release Date: 7/1/1994

Time to Seeing A Doctor About This Rash: 45 Minutes

We've already looked at the later PS1 port of this game back in Part 014 of that series. My thoughts are mostly the same now as then, with the caveat that I've learned slightly more about early 90's Alt Rock. We've now come back around to the original release, and it's almost exactly the same game. The only noticeable difference is that this version runs WAY WORSE than the later port. I mean, this game chugs at 20 fps most of the time. The menuing also feels worse and the FMV seems more compressed. None of this should be surprising, since the 3DO is significantly less powerful than the Playstation and this thing was likely an ambitious use of Panasonic's hardware. Now, the poor performance might also be a consequence of emulation issues, but I'm not gonna drop hundreds of dollars on a physical set-up to find out. One last point on this topic, the slowdown ends up making the game slightly easier by extending the reaction time needed to avoid obstacles.

This puts me in an awkward situation. Road Rash is very mid by the standards of 1995 PS1 games, but by the standards of 1994 3DO games, it might be the best one I've seen so far. You might be wondering why I'm not comfortable coming to that conclusion. If so, I would like to point you back to the first paragraph where I state that this thing runs like trash. This is an obviously compromised experience, and yet out of all the 3DO games I've looked at so far, it's the most complete and enjoyable. This is probably appropriate considering the platform, but that doesn't mean I have to like this result.

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Alone in the Dark

Developer: Krisalis Software

Publisher: Interplay Productions

Release Date: 8/3/1994

Time to Grabbed By The Ghoulies: 21 Minutes

I'm not sure how to approach this game. The original 1992 DOS release of Alone in the Dark was a seminal moment video game design. As reticent as I am to give French game developers any credit, the people at Infogrames introduced a lot of incredibly important design concepts for polygonal action/adventure games. This is basically where the idea of fixed camera angles with pre-rendered environments came from. It's also kinda the first Survival Horror game. I know it's reductive, but Resident Evil is just a better version of this game. Yet, because this is a trailblazing game, it's so much clunkier and awkward than the games which would come after it. For a modern player, that original DOS release is about two steps up from being unplayable. As with everything else in the 90's, the console version controls way worse than the PC version. That means this thing is only about a half-step up from unplayable.

That was a long-winded excuse for why I never made it past the first room in multiple attempts. This game moves so badly, like you don't even know. Though, if you have a handle on the controls and know what you're doing the whole thing can be completed in like an hour. The puzzles almost entirely consist of going to a place to get a thing and then using it at a different place. The combat is as janky as you could imagine from a pre-Resident Evil Survival Horror game, and the less said about the handful of platforming sections the better. I'm not sure what more to do with this thing besides stating its importance and moving on. That conclusion is of course reserved for the PC version, though I can't make any definitive statements about what, if any, impact the 3DO release would have had. Is this an important step in the evolution of d-pad controls for 3D games? I have no idea. Maybe Alone in the Dark QWOP-ed so that Resident Evil could tank control, or maybe not. Someone should look at this subject in greater depth. Also, the copy I played had an earsplitting audio bug that immediately wore down my patience, so maybe I would have had a better time without that.

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Way of the Warrior

Developer: Naughty Dog

Publisher: Universal Interactive Studios

Release Date: 8/6/1994

Time to Being Legally Distinct From Mortal Kombat: 10 Minutes

In early 2023, HBO aired The Last of Us, which by the end of its first season showed potential as a franchise that could act as main billing for the channel, a spot which had recently been vacated by the decade-spanning blockbuster series Game of Thrones. This new show was of course based on the hit video game series of the same name, whose initial entry was released by Naughty Dog in 2013.

That development studio began life as a couple of teenagers, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, programming random nonsense for the Apple II computer in the mid 80's. The pair parlayed some initial success into developing games for Electronic Arts, which teens could do back then. With the help of future folding@home creator Vijay S. Pande and some wacky shenanigans, they eventually published a tactical RPG for the Genesis in 1991. That game, titled Rings of Power because nerds will be nerds, received mediocre reviews and moderate sales, but that's kind of an impressive accomplishment for 21-year-olds. As the story goes, Jason and Andy were prepared to split up and go their separate ways after that project, but Trip Hawkins himself sent them free 3DO dev kits in 1993 to find out what they could do with the technology. After more shenanigans and a potential misuse of MIT funding, the pair produced Way of the Warrior under the assumption that Fighting games were easy to make.

That backstory is necessary to appreciate what I'm about to say about this game. It's bad. Not quite unplayable, but still really bad. This is primarily due to the horribly clunky controls and slightly unusable combo system. The digitized sprites are also hilariously poor, but that isn't necessarily a big detriment. The only positive point I can make is that I dig the soundtrack, which was taken from the White Zombie album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume 1. Your mileage may vary on whether that's a point for or against this game. Everything about the audio, visual, and 3doal design choices reflect the taste and judgement of unsupervised Gen X white guys in their early 20's. I'm not even going to go down the list characters or locations, because you can probably get a close enough idea just from the phrase, "it's a Mortal Kombat knock-off". Like all cheap imitations, which is a factual statement here and not an insult, it doesn't live up to the level of its inspiration. Though, Way of the Warrior is on the 3DO and Mortal Kombat isn't, so nature abhors a vacuum or something like that.

Most reviews from the time seem to have agreed with my sentiments towards the game. It's only notable because it existed when and where it did. That said, without this game Naughty Dog would have ceased to exist. Thus, following Domino Theory, if you're already tired of hearing about The Last of Us from your non-gaming acquaintances, you can place the blame ultimately on Trip Hawkins for being so generous with dev kits.

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Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed

Developer: Electronic Arts Canada

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Release Date: 8/31/1994

Time to Having An Unfulfilled Need: 26 Minutes

Staying on the Electronic Arts trend we've had going this week, let's look at the original release of The Need for Speed. I talked a bit about the rerelease of this thing on the PS1 back in Part 021 of that series. I was really down on that game because I was mentally comparing it to stuff like Ridge Racer and Sega Rally Championship, which are much better experiences. The thing is, within the context of the 3DO where its main competition is stuff like Crash & Burn or MegaRace this game suddenly becomes completely fine and acceptable. Though, that's misleading, as the 3DO release of The Need for Speed is a very different game than what would later be ported to other consoles.

The game still has the Road & Track partnership and car porn that we all know and love from the more well-known versions, but the racing part of this Racing game is almost completely different. There are only three courses here, all of which are point-to-point races consisting of up to three sections. You only race one other car, and there is no kind of tournament or grand prix mode on offer. You race your one opponent on very mundane roadways for like ten minutes, receive a score that goes on a leaderboard and get spat out to the main menu. You could experience every piece of content in this game in less than an hour.

The experience of driving the cars isn't awesome either. The cars and environments are butt-ugly and there is a complete lack of music during the races. The one positive thing I can say is that the driving model feels more advanced than anything that you likely could have found on the SNES or Genesis. From what I could glean, a lot of the development effort was put into creating that realistic driving model and the developers were largely successful in doing so. It's just that there isn't much of anything to do with the cutting-edge car physics, and you can imagine how poorly the driving model has aged in the intervening decades. There isn't anything that would recommend this game other than the fact that it basically works. Though by the standards of the 3DO, being basically playable is a high achievement.

Oh, and there's an FMV guy who says random crap to you at different moments throughout the game, I highly suggest watching all the clips below.

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Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

Developer: United Pixtures

Publisher: Kirin Entertainment

Release Date: 9/30/1994

Time to Having More Questions Than Answers: 42 Minutes

I've gone back and forth several times on what I should do about this particular piece of media. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties frequently appears on "Worst Games of All Time" lists and was the subject of a famous early Angry Video Game Nerd episode. I'm not sure how to feel about that, not because of any affection for this piece of crap, but because I hesitate to even classify it as a video game. Let's start at the top and see where we go from there.

This…thing is supposed to be an Interactive Movie in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. That story follows two schmucks named John and Jane, who we are introduced to us as they wake up and go about their morning routines. Each of them also receives phone calls where their parents harass them about finding someone to marry, I'm guessing because they're single and closing in on 30. Later, the two have what is supposed to be a meet-cute in the parking lot of some office building, he's a plumber or something and she's going in for a job interview. This is supposedly one of those love-at-first-sight kind of situations. Jane goes to her interview, where the old guy hiring manager almost immediately demands sexual favors in exchange for the job. Jane refuses but also gets half-naked for whatever reason. The old guy then tries to sexually assault her, and she runs for it with him giving chase. They run out to the parking lot where John is still hanging around for some reason, and he chases the pair in an attempt to rescue Jane. The trio run around various Los Angeles landmarks before ending up In a random construction site. As John is about to beat the crap out of the old guy, Jane tells him to stop, at which point she begins to negotiate some kind of sex-for-money deal with the old guy for some reason. At hearing this, John pleads with her to stop and confesses his love. Also, an older woman walks in and volunteers to have sex with the old guy for unclear reasons. After all that is settled, John and Jane ride off on his motorcycle.

That's the full plot explanation for the critical path. If that seemed like problematic nonsense, just know that I left out a lot of irrelevant details. For example, there is an unhelpful narrator that chimes in periodically who gets upstaged by a second narrator for a short time, who is then shot to death by the first narrator as he regains control of the narration. Then you have the whole tie joke which serves as the central gag for no apparent reason. At the beginning of the story John's mom tells him to wear a tie to work, even though he's a plumber. Jane comments on his weird outfit when they meet, and during the ending the last bit of dialogue has Jane not believing John when he says what he does for a living because, "plumbers don't wear ties." The punchline is the title. It's humor.

That's the thing, this game is supposed to be a romantic comedy. We're supposed to laugh at the grossly invasive parenting and sexual violence. Everything here is supposed to be a gag of some kind or another, and none of it lands. That's partly due to the writer not having understood how comedy works, and partly due to using the least effective storytelling technique possible. I might have buried the lede by only mentioning it now, but this isn't an FMV game. The only video is at the beginning where the lead actress unnecessarily explains the game to the player, the entire rest of the experience is a slideshow of static pictures with voiceover from the actors. Additionally, you only interact with the experience in seven decision points throughout the story where one choice continues the game and the rest lead to joke endings, after which the narrator berates you and gives you an opportunity to go back to the last decision point. This is the most hurky-jerky and low rent way to tell a story you could possibly do using an interactive format.

I don't want to call this thing a game, or an interactive movie, or slot it into any category of creative media. If anything, it's a shitpost that was sold in stores at full price. If this was a prank or a scam, then it would be glorious. I've seen retrospectives attempt to find some meaning in this thing, calling it either avant garde or dada-ist, but I don't think it deserves that kind of credit. This was likely meant to be an interactive comedy with softcore erotic elements, and it just failed miserably at that goal. I think what people get caught up on is how something could be this much of a creative and technical failure and still see make its way to store shelves. Shouldn't someone have stopped it at some point in the publishing process? Contemporary reviewers used this product as a way to criticize the 3DO's absence of content controls, so it was likely seen as nothing more than cheap, low-effort multimedia shovelware. Considering the landscape of early 90's gaming and the avalanche of multimedia nonsense, that would have been a fair judgement. I think this thing has maintained its own dark corner of popular culture while many, many other terrible multimedia products have faded because of the complete extent of its wrong-headedness. No one is supposed to publish something this terrible onto a game console, it doesn't happen. That unique quality is what causes me to become laden with so many questions.

Why did they rely on still images? Why have a narrator? Why use sexual assault as the joke? Why add interactivity if there's so little of it? What the hell is up with the title screen? Did the production staff think this was a good idea? Why the wacky hats? Why have that nudity joke? Why keep one FMV at the beginning if the rest is a slideshow? Are the decision screens so janky because they were a late addition? Why put it out at all if it turned out so bad? What was this thing originally supposed to be? Why have the tie to begin with? I have so many more questions. The kicker is that there is currently next to zero background information about this game out there on the internet. Kirin Entertainment would produce another couple of games for the 3DO and disappear. The writer/director/producer of this thing kind of dropped off the face of the earth, and most of the actors involved did nothing or next to nothing afterwards. The most prominent member of the cast is the actress who played Jane, Jeanne Basone, who had previously been one of the original GLOW cast members. The only reason there's anything out there about this thing is because she is occasionally asked about it in interviews.

That means all I can do right now is dissect the game frame by frame and line by line to attempt to extrapolate answers to my questions. That might be interesting as artistic criticism, but it won't get me answers. I've seen Plumbers Don't Wear Ties compared to Tommy Wiseau's The Room. While I don't agree with that comparison, The Room at least has seen extensive documentation and investigation into its creation, and even an Oscar nominated movie about that process. I wouldn't feel comfortable tackling this thing without any useful background info, which is why I eventually decided to not devote several thousand words and a dedicated post to this topic. That said, Limited Run Games is supposed to release a remaster of this thing in the coming weeks, and it looks like that package will include interviews and other materials that could shed some light into this dark corner of gaming history. If there's a satisfactory amount of stuff in that release, I will likely revisit this topic.

Regardless of future plans, this is the worst experience I've had with anything in the past year of writing these blogs. I felt physically and mentally dirty after going through this thing and I wanted to shower afterwards, but I'm sullied in ways that can never be cleaned. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has set a near-unattainable low bar against which to compare other bad games. If you have a sickness and want to watch me drag ArbitraryWater, ZombiePie, and friends through this experience, check out the video below. Also, the stream was as much a disaster as the game, so have fun with that.

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I want to say that the last game this week is as bad as the 3DO catalog gets, but that would be giving myself false hope. I'm going to update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and then drink this whole fiasco away.

1. Road Rash

…

11. Alone in the Dark

16. Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed

21. Way of the Warrior

…

29. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

Next time we're going to try and get this train back on the rails by looking at the next batch of 1996 PS1 games: Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors, NAMCO Museum Vol. 1, Epidemic, and International Track & Field.

When next we return to the 3DO, we'll have a better(?) time with Burning Soldier, Demolition Man, Jammit, Supreme Warrior, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo.

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As a reminder, send in any questions you have before 9/6 either through DM on Giantbomb or the contact form on the wordpress site. I'll put those into a Q&A section at the end of Part 027 to celebrate reaching the 100th PS1 game.

Also, I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.

Only a healthy and thriving development platform could play host to Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, and the definitive home port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, within weeks of each other.

When I read the title of "Plummers Don't Wear Ties", I thought for sure you had stumbled onto the first interactive FMV porn. Perhaps that was the original intent, but things kept getting scaled back and altered due to technical and logistical constraints. Sunk cost fallacy kept the project going until someone said, "Sitch what you've got together into something we can release!"

That's my head cannon for this anyway.

@jeffrud: What's that? I didn't fully hear you there. I think you said you want me to post a full playthrough of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties that I found on YouTube. Here ya go.

@judaspete: With so little out there, your head cannon is as good as mine at the moment.

Though, funny story about the porn vibes (not "haha" funny mind you), there's a cheat code you can enter that removes some of the censoring in the fake porn section. Though, it mostly just removes the censoring which covers the male nudity. It's a joke, you see. Do...do you get the joke? Ok, so, they assumed only horny straight guys play video games, and that those guys would want to see the censored boobs, but instead when they put in the pervy cheat code they mainly just get the censored dong and man butt. It's a humorous prank. Are you laughing? I awkwardly explained the joke so now you're supposed to laugh...laugh damnit.

@borgmaster: I have to admit, showing dong to a guy expecting boobs is kinda funny.

The Need For Speed on the Panasonic 3DO looks pretty fun to play in its time and I still prefer the golden age of video games more than the modern era of video games.

I never knew that Naughty Dog were about to call it quits before Way of the Warrior, that's really interesting. The next game they did, the "Sonic-ass" game, turned out pretty good too.

I kinda wanna watch a playthrough of Alone in the Dark now, too..

Thanks for a good write-up duder!

@judaspete: It would be funny if it were more competently done.

@gtxforza: I guess I didn't talk enough about how the actual driving itself is one of the most functional pieces of gameplay I've yet seen on the 3DO. There's just nothing you can do with it.

@cozmicaztaway: Any decent playthrough is less than an hour, so it won't take up much of your time and it's mostly worth it.

I didn't include the story of how Rubin and Gavin were able to get their fantasy game published by EA because it wasn't really necessary. Apparently, the two were being shown around the EA offices in '89 while they were shopping for a publisher. That was at the same time the bootleg Genesis dev kit was being made and Gavin somehow recognized it for what it was. They ended up negotiating a publishing deal with Hawkins in exchange for signing a NDA about the criminal shenanigan they witnessed. A lot of wacky coincidences happened on the way to Crash Bandicoot and at least two of them are Hawkins' fault.

@borgmaster: That's really, really funny. I mean, props to 'em for being kinda smart kids (wanting to wreck the CD drive in the PS1 excluded, I guess), but wow, that is hilarious! I guess that's what Trip saw in 'em though?

The "Golden age" could be literally any "age". It just depends on when you were a teenager