From the arcades to the handhelds, mobile phones to home consoles, absolutely nothing could prepare the video game world for the unrivaled experience that is 1993’s “Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties” — a critically maligned game which, after a quiet rerelease last spring, is now getting a special edition rerelease on the long-defunct ’90s video game system Panasonic 3DO. For the uninitiated, “Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties” was released as an “interactive romantic comedy” game meant for adults where, in a series of images with PowerPoint pacing, the player has to make “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style choices to help John, a struggling plumber on a bike, successfully woo Jane, a woman he meets in a parking lot as she’s en route to a job interview. What follows is a tale of corruption, Los Angeles action, narrator murder and a happily ever after — with plenty of raunchy ’90s shock humor along the way.
Released independently for the Windows PC and Panasonic’s aforementioned, relatively short-lived 3DO home console at a time before there were industry-wide ratings on games, this adults-only experience may have buried seeds in the minds of ’90s video game magazine readers, who perhaps encountered the scathing reviews in the July 1994 issue of PC Gamer (which gave the game a 3 out of 100 score and called it “the nadir of entertainment”), or who were vaguely intrigued by the title being the only video game for sale in the back-of-the-magazine catalogs with.
