Gaming Oddities: Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

Here is the first installment of a recurring feature in which I look at some of the strangest works of fiction I've ever encountered.

I will begin with a video game released for the Panasonic 3DO in 1993- Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. It ostensibly "Plays like a game... feels like a movie," but like many hybrids, it has all of each half's weaknesses and none of either half's strengths. It has a movie's lack of interactivity, and the poor storytelling that was par for the course for most video games back then.

So why do people still talk about it more than 25 years later, long after the console was written off as a failure? For all that Plumbers Don't Wear Ties did wrong, it wasn't merely bad, but often spectacularly so, an did things differently from many other games of the early 90s. This post will evaluate the game in a few different areas.

What's In A Name?

There are a few schools of thought when it comes to naming your work. Some works go for a straightforward title of the work, sometimes to the point of spoiling what happens in it. Others go for a cryptic title that may not make sense at first, if at all. Still others try something funny or cute.

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties derives its name from a line of dialogue, in which John complains about having to wear the tie his mother picked out for him (even though, curiously enough, he doesn't even bother to wear a button-down shirt with it). John's job as a plumber never becomes relevant to the plot, save for a few lines of dialogue by Jane.

In short, the title is one of a few things that causes you to wonder what the developers were thinking, but that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Production Values

I'll be blunt; Plumbers Don't Wear Ties's quality is unacceptable for even an amateur production, let alone a professionally made video game at full price..

The first reason is that it fails to deliver on its promise of an entirely full motion video experience. The vast majority of the game consists of still photographs with voiceovers, and the only full motion video comes when Jane explains the concept. This isn't too much to ask, since some games for the 3DO, like Night Trap, were completely FMV, even if that video looked choppy and low-resolution by today's standards. It doesn't help that much of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties involves the characters standing around and talking, so it's not as though it would be difficult to film the action.

The second reason is that even the still photos are rather strange, to put it mildly. Many of the shots are upside-down, in inverted colors(e.g. white becomes black, orange becomes blue, etc.), have strange filters applied, and/or have foreign objects haphazardly edited onto them. It's as though the people responsible for editing with the photos played around with the editing program without trying to make the photos presentable.

The third reason is that those involved in planning the game barely seemed to care how it turned out. Most of the game takes place in or around an office building, which one could assume is the publishers' corporate headquarters. During the chase scene, in which Thresher chases Jane and John runs after them to help Jane, you can see the characters fooling around in the city, apparently having forgotten what they were supposed to do. Near the end, one outtake from John's voice actor- "I've been searching for me- for you,"  is left in, along with his actor commenting on it. Something similar happens in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in which a minor NPC's voice actress recites her line, asks for a retake, then tries again, but Oblivion was clearly a better-made product.

The fourth reason is that the bare minimum effort was placed into making the game appealing. As mentioned before, the actors barely seemed to be trying, and the photos seemed to be taken in the same location in the space of an afternoon. The title card seems to have been made in Paint or some other art program, as do the images for the options to try again or return to the title screen, and most of the text for the credits is gaudy and unprofessional. Most of the music seems to be stock music, and barely seems to fit the mood.

On a final, minor note, the characters not only are bland and mostly devoid of personality, but the leads' names- John and Jane- sound more like the names given to unidentified murder victims than to memorable protagonists. Compare Phoenix Wright, a name that is unique, as well as a clever translation of his Japanese name (Ryuichi Naruhodo), making it a good pick for the iconic star of the Ace Attorney franchise of visual novels. Only Mark Thresher's name sounds at all interesting, and almost everyone else lacks a name. Both the male and female narrators are named, but since they're never addressed by name, you don't need to remember those names.

As you can see, it's rather surprising to see a game this incompetently made ever made it to stores, but that's one of a few things that are unique about Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.

Gameplay

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is hard to classify, since it barely qualifies as a game. It could only be described as an early visual novel, long before the genre became popular, but even that label doesn't fit perfectly.

One of the most bizarre parts of this game, at least in comparison to other visual novels, is that your choices determine the outcome of a scene, rather than your character's words or actions. For example, when Jane interviews for a job at Thresher's company, the game has you choose what Thresher decides- to hire her and have her serve as his mistress, harshly turn her away, or offer her a job in exchange for sex. A standard visual novel with Jane as the player characte would likely have Thresher tell her that he turned her down, and let you choose whether to politely accept the decision, protest or offer to have sex with him.

This unusual structure may be because the POV character changes from scene to scene, whereas in most cases, the POV character is fairly consistent; visual novels are almost exclusively told from the first person perspective of the story's protagonist. In Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, however, the first scene is from John's perspective, then it switches to Jane at home. When John and Jane meet in the parking lot, it seems to be from John's POV, but it switches back to Jane's POV for the interview. The POV character is never clear, especially when you're making decisions regarding what other people do

Of course, the choices you make don't matter much, since the game is highly linear for a visual novel. If you make a wrong choice, you'll immediately get a bad ending, have points deducted from your score and be sent back to the last decision. Somewhat annoyingly, the only way to progress to the ending involves choosing to have Thresher ask Jane to have sex with him for the job, a decision that puts your score so far into negative points that you will never be able to recover.

Linearity isn't always a bad thing, but only when there are reasons for it. In visual novels that focus more on gameplay, such as Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, the game reasonably expects you to correctly answer every question in order to proceed, or be penalized and forced to try again. In dating sims, there may be a section of the game that determines which route you get, with each path being more linear but having a few endings. For example, Katawa Shoujo's Act 1 has one ending for each of the five girls, plus a bad ending, while each route has a good ending and one or two bad endings (although in Lilly's case, the bad ending merely stops at the end of the apparent final scene, whereas the good ending continues after that part). Essentially, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties needed additional story branches, more meaningful choices and/or some semblance of interactivity.

The Strange

As I mentioned in Production Values, many of the odd parts of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties come from it being poorly made, but there's more to it than that.

As I briefly touched on when discussing John's outtake making it into the finished product, the game often breaks the fourth wall. In Jane's first scene, her father calls to tell her about "that bitch of a mother" nagging John to give her grandchildren in the previous scene, and explicitly refers to the event as a scene. Keep in mind that Jane's father wasn't present in the last scene, and had no way of knowing about John's phone conversation with his mother.

Then there's the narrator, a man in a tacky purple suit who occasionally wears a chicken mask (don't ask why) who actually addresses the player, commenting on the player's decisions. Unfortunately, since the only way to proceed with the story is to make the worst possible choice, the player will receive a lot of verbal abuse and mockery. The narrator claims that you're the worst player he's guided through the story, and even goes so far as to suggest that the player might even get "the lowest score in the history of this game." While this comment is unfair in light of the fact that it's impossible to finish with a possible score, it's possible to rack up an especially high negative score by repeatedly getting bad endings, so there is a way for you to do worse.

As if this weren't strange enough, during the chase scene, a woman in a karate gi shows up, intending to claim the title of narrator. She succeeds by beating up the narrator and is no kinder to the player than the male narrator. Some time later, the male narrator returns and guns down the female narrator with a yellow plastic toy gun, in a manner that must be seen to be believed. After a rather misogynistic rant about women taking over society, he gets back to raking you, the player, over the coals for your mistakes. Even getting to the best ending doesn't earn the narrator's forgiveness, as he still brings up your abysmal score. It's apparently meant to be funny, but much of the humor is at the player's expense, as well as over things beyond the player's control.

Conclusion

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is a strange game in many regards. It's obvious that the developers put the bare minimum of effort into making it, but at the same time, they ended up creating a unique product, if not a good one. As a result of that lack of effort, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is more than a terrible game on a failed console, but a fourth-wall breaking proto-visual novel that's worth talking about years later, even if most of those discussing it are also laughing at it.

If you're interested in learning more, I recommend The Angry Video Game Nerd's video on Plumber's Don't Wear Ties, which provides amusing, if vulgar, commentary on the game, and was how I first heard about it.