Games of the Abstract: Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (1993)

 

Developer: United Pixtures

Publisher: United Pixtures; Kirin Entertainment (3DO); Limited Run Games (Re-release)

One Player

3DO Interactive Multiplayer / Microsoft Windows

 

I'm going to marry a virgin, in the nineties!

It is funny in a positive way, though very perverse, that Plumbers Don't Wear Ties in 2021 was announced as a release from Limited Run Games¹, a specialist company who release very limited edition physical releases. Canonised by YouTube figure James Rolfe, the mind behind the Angry Video Game Nerd, a show he started in 2006 on the site covering "bad" retro games, the history of Plumbers... is ironic. Normally this is an alarm bell for me, but with mind to having actually played this 3DO title, the infamy is as much what a curious artefact it was even in the early nineties. This is more so as the infamous version is a conversation, that the original 1993 version was first a PC Windows release, with the Philips 3DO Interactive Multiplayer version the one people remember through Rolfe's masochistic and scatological rants through such games.

"Playing" Plumbers also required huge air quotes, as on the surface this is a full motion video choose-your-own-adventure game for the adult audience, but it is something more misguided. For starters, for the 3DO version which is the basis of the review, there is only one FMV video sequence before the game's beginning, with actress Jeanne Basone in character as Jane, explaining the set up whilst, with her dialogue, setting herself up as a sexually confident figure. Plumbers originally was developed by United Pixtures for the PC version, becoming for a long time a lost port of the game^2, whilst the 3DO version was published by Kirin Entertainment. A subsidiary of retailer Digital Stuff, Inc. created by Jason Chen in 1994, they are only really know for Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, despite also publisher a PC FPS, Esoteria, developed by Mobeus Designs³. Any sense of who put together the game comes with the director/writer/producer credit of Michael Anderson⁴, who should not be confused with the British director Michael Anderson, who helmed The Quiller Memorandum (1966).

Kirin Entertainment, a Fremont, California-based game company⁵, nonetheless immortalised themselves by accident. The game is a series of still photos telling a narrative in a slide shot, a plot in truth that is a short film, with barely an hour's worth of gameplay, and a considerable amount of padding to even get to that length. You have Edward J. Foster as John, the titular plumber who goes to work, wearing a tie his mother got him far more loosely than Donkey Kong, a monkey, would, crossing paths with Jane, a beautiful woman on her way to a job interview with Thresher (Paul Bokor). Thresher's blatantness for getting potential employees to sleep with him proves a huge section of the choices, all of which barely count up beyond one hand's worth of fingers let alone two. Prominent, before we get to how this story goes and is told, is the 3DO itself, as conceived by Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts who left the company in the time of the 3DO's rise and fall. His console had idiosyncratic touches to how it would treat videogames and being a videogame console. One at an unfortunate cost, literal of $699.99 dollars when originally released in the United States in 1993, was that alongside being more costly for the console itself, it was both designed to innovate as a multi-media system, but that also their hardware specifications were outsourced so multiple companies could make their own versions of the machine.

In the opposite direction, software developers paid far less to get work, CD based, onto the system, and with Hawkins' machine anti-region locking and censorship, it had many adult and erotic productions, such as a series of productions from Vivid Interactive and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. The irony is the, baring one scene of actual nudity, in the ten to fifteen minute prologue before the first choice, there is none other else barring Jeanne Basone is her underwear, least a bra prominently showing off her bust, and even the nudity, of Basone in the shower and actor Foster's bare buttocks, are censored for the 3DO version. There is apparently a cheat - on the 3DO controller pressing [Up], [Down], [Right], [Left], [Down], [Right] and [X] while Jane is talking in the intro FMV scene⁴ - but un-censoring certain photos, which are censored with a pair of eyes and a large proboscis prodding through the red censor symbol, does not get past the absurdity of a game meant for adults but this tame.

The prologue is not something you would have expected either, a huge warning of the work put together in randomness and duct tape unleashed into the world. Looking like it was made in a basic photo editor from the era, this is random in the truest sense for a comedy game, where the opening is John dreaming of a man in a panda mascot suit, driving in a go-kart in a race on a speedway, very noticeably pasted into Daytona-like race photos beneath trippy post-image effects. The other thing to note, and be warned of too, is that alongside its random sense of humour is some of the most politically incorrect humour you can find, not even aged but timeless in the sense it feels alien to the modern day. It even jokes in one of the bad endings before you choose it that it is the option available when fighting is considered un-PC in that era, so it made with an awareness of that era's climate on the subject to thumb its nose in the same way a child eats food with its mouth open to be crass. It comes with the perverse dichotomy that, for most, this will just be offensive, but its infamy and cult status comes from also being mad as a box of frogs at the same time. That un-interactive prologue, with "Microwave Jane" as she nicknames herself in the only video footage, finds herself being called by her father, a man around a table with alcohol and even rat poison in a scarf, who wants children N-O-W. John is in as bad a position as his mother, in the phone call he also gets within the prologue, wants him married to, with a potential suitor available already. The leads are not nice people either, especially not John regardless of what options you choose, but already we are in a strange world of forced marriage and sex appeal, like a tainted parody take on romance.

Plumbers as a game has almost everything you could think of in terms of offensive humour. Gay panic humour, as John's mother worries briefly her son is gay; sexism into misogyny, just from the fact that, if for the first option you choose is for Jane to make the first pass to John than visa-versa, he will consider her a slut even if still interested and continuing the game; not having either of them make a pass leads to an ending where they imagine themselves as different people, of different ethnicities too, as John considers that white men to women then had no rhythm. It is tasteless, and most will not get past this. The ironic history of the game, and what compelled me, is that there is incompetence but there is also madness here in its amateur nature. It cannot be defended, and I will say right now, that if this is all enough to wish to avoid the game, that is not surprise, and completely understandable.

I have not even mentioned the narrator yet, who when he is introduced, wearing a purple suit, has an army tank driver's helmet on, sometimes on a full chicken mascot head on as he talks to the viewer. A feminist who specialises in invading other peoples' stories as the narrator knocks him out briefly, chastising the player for being a pervert before he brings forth a gun to get his role back. It is all strange, and this is all in mind there is not a lot of actual interactivity at all. It does deserve one credit that, if you get a "bad" ending, willingly to annoy the original narrator in my case, you immediately get the option to go back to where the choice is made, which is better than having to sit through the same footage before again. There is a points system, at the bottom left corner, but it is insignificant, and there is an option to just skip the first fifteen minute prologue to get to the main game quickly.

There is voice acting over the still images, and beyond the small cast, there are two voices for the choices section, one male and one female who put on very accented voices which is strange in itself. The humour is trying to have its cake and eat it, its saucy humour entirely sexist, with no one particularly coming off well at all. The main plot, of Thresher trying to seduce Jane with money, aside from not aging well, also does not progress far from this to a very long game at all. It afterwards quickly leads to a finale, with an extended (ten minute?) chase when, if chosen to progress, Thresher will try to kill her with a letter opener with Jane running after him. Turning into a series of jaunts needing the Benny Hill Show theme tune, it goes into shots at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, through a market with confused bystanders caught on camera, the cast like Basone posing with bystanders, Basone throughout this just above the waist in a bra only, and early Microsoft Paint covering over a theatre marquee of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom of the Opera to tell Jane to run.

Able to be finished quickly, the plot just after that, after trying to kill her, is Thresher trying to still bribe Jane to go with him, with only a few choices to be made and a "Hollywood" ending the only good ending of them all the goal to reach. The Hollywood ending, alongside where the title comes in, is anti-climatic as the happy conclusion. Instead, I found myself more pleasure, alongside the ease to access the bad endings, intentionally annoying the exasperated narrator choosing endings which, tasteless or not, better even as the bad endings. Some are least funny even for a game where most of the comedy is unintentional. It gets away with not saying a homophobic word whilst still implying it for one, which is unacceptable, but the ending where John and Thresher suddenly decide to be a couple is a better ending. Between ones where she can either take Thresher's money, or inform John that she intends to stay a virgin and likely become a nun, Jane gets one ending, even if joking about older businessmen seducing employees is more problematic now, which is arguably the best ending. Even if an excuse for Jeanne Basone to be in her underwear, the ending where she reveals her inner dominatrix, with handcuffs and a whip suddenly in hand, taking the spineless sleaze ball and making him a submissive in his office, promising to give her the best paid job there whilst being rode around in his underwear like a pony, is a superior ending to the one you are meant to get.

You could argue the game is intentionally ironic with its true ending being lame, but the truth is, the project has the air of improvisation and messiness. One of its more idiosyncratic moments is Edward J. Foster accidentally fluffing a line for a Freudian slip, which is kept in and is either an accident, or a faked one, and the blurring of the sides of what is what fits a mess in concept and existence. It is, truly, not a production I would recommend unless you wish to dip into the guiltiest of weird cultural items. It is truly bizarre, yet I openly admit it is one of the technically and morally worse things I have encountered as a game even if compelling.

Thankfully, the ironic cult status is aware of this. Limited Run Games, releasing this game, clearly knows this, and it is sweet to know that, whilst an odd choice of word for this game, those involved sees the game as it is. It also has one of the most fascinating figures of any FMV game to have crossed paths with in Jeanne Basone herself, from this becoming an author and stunt woman whose careers before this game and after is compelling to learn of. Before this, she was literally Hollywood in GLOW, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, a television all-female wrestling show whose interest led to a fictitious television drama decades, and Basone's career, with this a curious footnote to it, gets even more fascinating afterwards. Anyone who, after GLOW and Plumbers, decided to be self employed, having her own published videos of wrestling other women in eroticised scenarios, or even having paid clients that, with no nudity or sex involved, she wrestled even in booked hotels⁶, is a distinct figure, one to this day clearly has a sense of self pride and personality to admire. Eventually starting an artisan soap company with an emphasis against animal testing⁷, Basone really emphasises that, for all the problematic aspects about Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, the people around it fascinating and soften the production, seeing that this was literally a day's work as truthfully many of these productions were. How weird it is actually softens the blow too as, whilst technically a disaster as much as its content is also such, it's perplexing creative decisions neuter any concerns with wondering where this was beamed from in the outer reaches of space.

 

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1) Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties: Definitive Edition Arrives This Year, written by Marcus Stewart and published by Game Informer on June 6th 2022.

2) Closing Logos Group page on United Pixtures.

3) Giant Bomb's page on Kirin Entertainment.

4) FMV World's page on Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, a site in tribute to FMV games from the past to the current day.

5) The Web Archive page for Kirin Entertainment.com's contact info, from between December 5th 1998 to May 3rd 1999.

6) How an '80s Female Wrestling Star Makes Thousands in Underground Hotel Fights, written by Dan McCarthy, and published by Thrillist on January 19th 2017.

7) The about page for HollywoodBotanika, Jeanne Basone's artisan soap company.