Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing Review: Somehow Even More Broken Than Before

Listen, if you are on this website, then you probably know what Big Rigs is. You’ve seen Alex Navarro’s legendary video review on GameSpot. You know that this game is unbelievably broken. You know that if you reverse and hold left or right, you’ll start moving impossibly fast in a circle until you fire out in one direction and off the map.

I briefly touched upon the game recently, but this isn’t a review breaking down why Big Rigs is rightfully thought of as one of the worst games of all time, because it just is; there is no getting around that. What this piece is, however, is a review of one of the worst and laziest preservation efforts ever published that has the gall to charge players money for an even more broken, inaccurately recreated version of a historically relevant game.

Video game preservation is vitally important. Knowing where this art form comes from, its history, turmoil, highs, and lows, is going to be the basis for shaping what comes next. Companies like Digital Eclipse and Nightdive have made a business out of creating loving compilations and re-releases of classics (and not-so-classics) for years now. Digital Eclipse's excellent Gold Master Series, which is part video game collection, part interactive documentary for things like Tetris, Karnataka, and Atari and Intellvision’s libraries are incredible interactive catalogues. While Nightdive is creating definitive versions games like Doom, Doom 2 and Doom 64, and Quake and Quake 2, and remasters of cult classics like Killing Time and SiN and The Thing.

Even less celebrated, and outright bad games, deserve to be celebrated and preserved. Hence why we are now getting collections for Gex and Bubsy courtesy of Limited Run Games, because studying and playing these bad games can teach us so much about what makes a video game good.

Big Rigs’ recent Steam release is not preservation. It’s not even a celebration of jank. It’s a half-hearted grift to cash in on early internet meme-nostalgia. Games like Killing Time: Remastered understand that these games aren’t perfect, but the team preserving them have put the legwork in to make these flawed experiences playable on modern systems, so that you can experience something close to what it was like back in the day.

Somehow, Margarite Entertainment has made this historically broken game less playable on modern systems. The game opens exclusively in fullscreen mode, which is fine, but the problem is it took me about three hours of troubleshooting to figure out why Big Rig would boot up so zoomed in that the bottom right-hand corner of the game was totally out of view on my screen. Making it impossible for me to actually select “Start” on the race select menu. Turns out, it was because of the fact that I had text size set to 125% on the Windows level, the game launched 125% bigger than the screen.

The game is also touted as being “Steam Deck Playable”; it is not. You can try, but the game can’t even open the application and instead will hang on a “launching game” window for hours. What’s more is that once you do get the game working, it seems that the experience has been tampered with. Famously, the AI in Big Rigs does not compete with you, obviously envious of your overpowering skill. Other trucks simply do not move in the original game. In this new version, they do, sometimes, kinda, then they stop or veer off the road. It seems as if there might have been some attempt to reimplement AI racers, which was quickly given up on.

On top of this, Big Rigs' Steam release is now home to a bevvy of visual bugs that the original didn’t have, likely down to emulation issues, as the game’s already ugly textures flicker in and out of existence. As if that weren’t enough, Margarite has tried to persuade Steam users that it has put some degree of work into the new version. That’s because this release has new free content. The “Your Winner” content pack is, in reality, several additional Steam Trophies whose implementation seems to be temperamental at best, and several AI-generated screenshots. WHICH CAN’T EVEN BE ACCESSED IN THE GAME. They are just images on the DLC’s Steam page.

There is room for remakes of bad games. Big Rigs isn’t that. It’s a cheap attempt to make a quick buck off of terminally online streamers who need something to react to and people who want to be a part 20-year-old internet joke. Maybe there is some beautiful poetic irony to even its re-release two decades later, feeling like a scam, but I have to say, if you really want to experience this part of video game history, and to try to learn something from it, just download it from the Internet Archive.

1/10

Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing was reviewed on PC, and was purchased by our reviewer.

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