ET. Superman 64. Gollum. There are a whole lot of games in the running as "the worst of all time," but none of them hold a candle to Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, a broken mess of racing game that launched to a Metacritic score of just 8 out of 100 back in 2003. Today, it was finally re-released on Steam, where it's apparently finding a whole new audience of ironic fans ready to appreciate the finest garbage gaming has to offer.
The Steam release of Big Rigs was announced a few weeks ago to no shortage of disbelief, not least because publisher Margarite Entertainment had appeared out of nowhere to bring back this genuinely awful piece of software with no apparent connection to original publisher GameMill. In a Steam forum post, Margarite clarified that it had "obtained the rights to a few classic titles (including Big Rigs Over the Road Racing) worldwide," and somehow nobody has stopped it from happening.
Big Rigs hit Steam earlier today at a launch price of $4.79, or $5.92 if you also want the soundtrack bundle. It is Big Rigs in all its terrible glory, complete with buildings you can drive straight through, mountains you can drive straight over, a reverse gear that lets you reach speeds approaching infinity, and races that'll always give out a "you're winner" trophy for reaching the end. This is the 1.0 patched version of the game, which at least means that rival racers actually move unlike in the original retail release, though they still stop before the finish line.
There are any number of YouTube videos you could peruse to understand the depths to which Big Rigs sinks, but personally I'd recommend GameSpot's old video review, which is itself a classic piece of gaming lore.
All this is to say that you absolutely should not purchase Big Rigs if you want anything approaching a good – or even fully functional – game. If, however, you want to laugh at something uniquely terrible with a few friends over a Discord stream, I guess this is at least going to be easier to run than the old pirated "abandonware" versions that have dotted the internet for years.
Big Rigs has launched to a peak concurrent player count of 71, which is about 71 more than it deserves, and modern garbage enthusiasts have dropped dozens of positive reviews netting to an 83% rating on Steam. The handful of negative reviews mostly point toward how "sketchy" this paid re-release is, but honestly, nothing could better match the bizarre legacy Big Rigs has left behind.
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