Original Release: United Pixtures, 1993, PC
Other Releases: 3D0 (1994)
Hunky plumber and sexy model must be guided to their destiny in Choose Your Own Adventure style.
Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties (PC, United Pixtures, 1993)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Page
Review by: Master-B
Setting aside the anomalies of the 80s, the “early CD-ROM” gaming era as we tend to think of it now didn’t really begin until the Sega CD came out in 1992 and was followed up by the first FMV and first-person environment games on PC the next year (7th Guest, Myst). Those standards were humble, with short FMV clips that often looked quite out of place. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties is from that period, but doesn’t even manage to meet that lowly standard. It doesn’t even offer FMVs (save for the introduction), basically stitching together Powerpoint slides of still pictures accompanied by the occasional branching choice.
It makes it into the annals of Plumflower due to gratuitous nekkid shower scenes near the beginning along with main heroine Jane spending quite a bit of the game running around in lingerie and such, but it really isn’t a porn game. Instead, it’s a truly bizarre quest for love as hunky male model runs into rock video background chick and it’s now your duty to spark their romance by making the right choices. Another happy ending for the pretty people!
However, as things unfold it’s more like you’re directing the course of the story rather than role-playing as either of the protagonists and making choices for them. The game opens with the pair running into each other in a parking lot, and your first choice is who speaks to who or simply having them ignore each other.
The only real appeal is that this was made by some little fly-by-night outfit that totally DGAF and made some of the story branches way out there, like with one you can have Jane turn her boss into a paypig and ride him like a horsie. There’s also this simmering subplot where the narrator gets randomly kicked out of his job by some karate schoolgirl, then later he comes back and guns her down with a super soaker.
This piece of gaming history comes to us from United Pixtures, which appears to have never made another game before or after this. The whole production is credited to Michael Anderson, who actually DID go on to a long career in the industry … but in programming and cinematics mostly, I can’t find another writing credit for him after this.
Another little footnote is that Jane is played by Jeanne Basone, who also went on to a robust career unrelated to sleazy video games. Apparently she was a wrestler with GLOW prior to this game, then went on to become a stuntwoman in a variety of high-profile shows and movies. If you’re looking for moar spicy stuff she apparently also did one of those softcore nudity-only BDSM videos back in the 90s around when this came out, but I can’t find any links to it other than a handful of screenshots.
Anyway, the whole thing is so short and simple that someone actually managed to create a playable version of it via a YouTube playlist (linked below).
Links
Videos