Steam Just Received One of the Worst Racing Games to Ever Release, and This Is Now the Worst Day of My Life

There are many video games out there that would qualify as “bad.” But there’s only one video game that could be considered the worst. In my personal opinion, that would be 2003’s Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. Let me stress: This game is terrible. It should not exist. It’s hardly finished. But now, for some strange reason, you can buy it on Steam. You know, just in case you weren’t disappointed by Big Rigs the first time around.

‘You’re Winner’

As Waypoint’s managing editor Dwayne Jenkins originally reported in late March, Big Rigs made its way to Steam after publisher Margarite Entertainment reportedly received the rights to publish the game. Big Rigs was originally developed by Stellar Stone in conjunction with GameMill Publishing, and the game is just awful. Truly awful. The very first version of the game was published in a massively unfinished state, complete with a typo that says “You’re Winner” when you finish your race. (Mercifully, a patched version of the game changes this typo to “You Win!”)

Videos by VICE

“Racing” is a generous term for what’s happening in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. The original version of the game had no functional AI. Luckily, a patch allows players to race the computer. But Big Rigs is still left utterly unloseable. As the Angry Video Game Nerd shows in his video from 2014, the updated AI will race you… and then stop at the finish line, allowing you to win. YOU CAN’T LOSE! THIS GAME IS FOR WINNERS!

Gravity? What gravity?! This is ‘Big Rigs’, Baby

As for driving your big rigs? Cooked. Completely and utterly cooked. Your truck goes right through buildings and objects. In some cases, you’ll clip through hilly terrain. Otherwise, you’ll just keep running across the map as if glued to it. Going uphill even improves your momentum at times. As AVGN says, “the truck is giving gravity the middle finger.”

You can also accelerate backwards or forwards and just keep going. And going. And going. And going. And going. Until you break the game. Watch AVGN’s Big Rigs review from a decade ago below to learn everything you need to know.

Now, I get Big Rigs is a funny meme. We all saw footage of this “game” (if you can call it that) back in the day and laughed at its oddities. But why rerelease it? More specifically, why sell the game for $5.99 on Steam?

I mean, sure, you can get the game at launch for 20% off. But if I ran a company that vowed to publish one of the biggest memes in gaming history, I’d want to release that title for free and leak the source code so people could do whatever they want with it. Asking people to pay for Big Rigs just because it’s a funny game from two decades ago… I don’t know. That doesn’t sit well with me.

Granted, Margarite Entertainment is using the game’s Steam Discussion page to ask gamers if they want any other older titles brought to Steam, vowing to “give priority to the classic old games that are mentioned the most.” All this may be one big marketing opportunity for the company, one that lets them get some visibility and score the negotiating upper-hand for releasing more old school titles. Or at least publish lesser known games that suck ass.

If that’s the plan? I’m here for it. Go ahead, Margarite, drum up some popularity and release some games seemingly lost to licensing hell. I just don’t know about this one. Let Big Rigs be for the people, supersonic racing and all.

In the meantime, the Steam reviews for this game are predictably hilarious. So maybe this isn’t the worst day after all.