Half-Life. The original Fallout. Skyrim. Elden Ring. Every generation of PC history is been marked by an epochal, visionary game – a game that tests the boundaries of what developers, players, and critics believe is possible. Originally released in 2003, Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing is not one of those games. It’s not even close. It’s terrible, actually. It’s really rubbish. But in the same sense that it pays to know the limits of one’s own depravity – to push yourself into the deepest, darkest place possible so you can say ‘I’ve been there, I’ve faced it, and I’ve returned’ – Big Rigs is a valuable exploration into the recesses of gaming squalor. Like the decomposing corpse of Ray Brower, it must be seen to be believed. It is a formative experience. And now, Big Rigs is back.
If you were to walk past it in the store, Big Rigs would appear as a relatively standard albeit cheaply produced racing game. But the power of the vampire is in his charm – he can only bite you once you invite him into your home. Forget mechanics. Forget visual design. Forget everything you know about the fundamentals of the videogame as a cultural object. Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing doesn’t work.
And I don’t mean that it has a lot of bugs or that it crashes a lot. I mean it is literally malfunctional. There are five race tracks that you may choose to compete upon, but if you select the fourth one, the game will always freeze (whether this has been changed for the Steam re-launch I do not know, though I hope not, because it would be like repairing the crack in the Liberty Bell). Your opponent, also one of the titular Big Rigs, does not move. To make that clear, this is a racing game where there is no racing. Perhaps this is an unintentional and sad byproduct of Big Rigs’ notoriously beleaguered production, or perhaps it is an exercise in irony, not dissimilar to René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images –
ce n’est pas un jeu de course.
There is no collision detection, so you can drive straight through every and any object in Big Rigs’ approximation of a 3D world. There is no time limit. Despite the box art, which features an image of a police car, you are not pursued by any in-game law enforcement. If you drive off-road, you incur no speed penalty, and there is no gravity, meaning you can drive up hills at the same velocity as driving on flat ground. If you turn your truck around and prosecute the course in reverse, the game’s speed limiter fails, allowing you to accelerate indefinitely, until you warp out of the map’s boundaries into an infinite, grey lacuna.
Of the 14,788 games catalogued on Metacritic across all platforms, the lowest scored is something called ‘Family Party: 30 Great Games Obstacle Arcade,’ released for the Wii U in 2012. Big Rigs doesn’t make the official list – to be eligible, games be reviewed and scored by at least seven separate publications, and Big Rigs doesn’t qualify. Nevertheless, based on the reviews it has received, Big Rigs has an aggregate Metascore of 8, less than half of Family Party’s comparatively glowing 17.
To play Big Rigs is to witness the videogame at its crudest, its most pitiful, and its most helpless. In that sense, it is essential. You can get it here.
Alternatively, visit the other pole with the best PC games, or, if you relish the psychological challenge presented by Big Rigs, the best survival games available now.
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