Give it some credit: it’s not every game that lets you edit the text in its installation wizard while you wait for setup to conclude. But Big Rigs dares to be so bold. It is also so bold as to allow you to accelerate to literally infinite speeds by holding reverse, to have absolutely zero collision, and to splatter a .bmp of a three-handled trophy on the screen whenever you reach the end of a track, underlined by royalty-free WordArt reading “YOU’RE WINNER.”
Big Rigs is a game out of legend. After its release in 2003, it made headlines for just how much it sucked. This was a pre-digital distribution era: someone had to go out and print this thing onto actual discs. It felt like a baffling relic from another dimension and the reviewers were quick to point it out—some even built their own legends off the back of the game’s rotten one.
So when it hit Steam last month, I couldn’t resist trying it for myself. Could it really be that bad? Brain-breakingly bad? Soul-crushingly bad? So bad it sucks the life out of you?
Well, yes. But also no. But also yes.
Here’s the thing: in 2003, Big Rigs was absolutely as bad as the stricken reviewers made out. The entire thing was broken and, even if it hadn’t been, the absolute peak that this thing could ever have been was a 4/10 forgettable turn-of-the-century racer. The kind of game you might have been able to buy at a gas station while out of your mind on trucker speed. It’s technologically and philosophically bankrupt, then and now. It’s a blight on the Earth and you shouldn’t buy it.
But, in 2025, what isn’t? The thing about our modern era is we get a hundred Big Rigses every day releasing on Steam—broken, bankrupt, or just plain scams. 22 years ago Big Rigs was auratic: its badness was a source of mystery, almost allure. If they made it today it would barely raise an eyebrow. Also you’d be able to have sex with the trucks.
Mostly positive
Big Rigs has 350 reviews on Steam, sitting comfortably at a Mostly Positive review rating. Does this mean the game is secretly a beautiful hidden gem? That it contains untold treasures for the player dedicated enough to uncover them?
I think it might just means the Steam user review process is so in thrall to irony, spam, and a general sense of inertia as to be functionally useless. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe Big Rigs is great.
It does maintain something, though. Age has granted its awfulness an entirely new aura—it’s no longer unique for being bad, it’s unique for being an elder statesman of badness. Looking at it is like seeing through time, glimpsing the dark present of videogame asset-flips and shovelware through its shoddy prism. That’s the reason Margarite Entertainment—whatever the hell that is—brought it back in the first place: it’s the Old Testament to our modern-day New Testament (Furry Shakespeare*), a prefiguring and predictive influence: the Lumiere Brothers of total garbage.
Should you spend actual human money on it? No. You can get everything you need from Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing by watching 30 seconds of it on YouTube. But it is a strange and interesting artefact to consider in the era of shovelware and AI slop. It’s at once their ancestor and a relic of a more innocent time, when it was truly possible for a game to be noteworthy just for being bad. It’s hard to believe we ever lived in an era so free of sin.
*I’ll be honest, this game might be great. No slander towards Furry Shakespeare intended.
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