What is the highest speed you have ever felt while playing a video game? You might be thinking of F-Zero, a Mario Kart at 200 cc on Rainbow Road, the craziness of Forza or Need For Speed… But in 2003 there was a game whose speed cannot even be replicated now. The best part? It wasn’t even a rally, kart, or high-speed car game, but a truck game. Its title, Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing, considered one of the worst titles in history and filled with bugs, but with an award that only this disaster could achieve.
Kill me, truck!
To understand how a game like this ended up on all the lists of the most outrageous games ever made, one must look at its producer, Stellar Stone, apparently from Santa Monica, California, but which allowed all its games to be made in Eastern European countries such as, for example, Ukraine. You thought you were playing something proudly American, but in reality, it was made by a guy named Dimitri in Kiev. That was the case with Big Rigs, which, when it got into their hands, was already complete, and even when playing it and seeing that it was full of bugs, they couldn’t do anything.
Imagine the situation: you have an absolute nonsense on your hands but since it was programmed in Ukraine, you can’t make changes. What you have is what you get. For its director, the game was still in a pre-alpha version, which did not prevent it from being on store shelves on November 20, 2003. Sergey Titov, the owner of the distributor, was so embarrassed that he offered to exchange the game for any title from Activision Value. Twenty people did this who didn’t know what to do with Big Rigs.
And yet, despite having terrible ratings from the industry (it has a 6 out of 100 on Metacritic), having issues with the truck controls, bugs affecting enemy movement, game physics, and collisions, and being barely playable, Big Rigs has gone down in history for all those seeking a completely different experience (even if that isn’t a good thing). Indeed, as part of these errors, you could make your truck go at a speed that no human being will ever experience.
KITT, activate super-speed!
According to what has been verified, the developers completely forgot to set a limit on the speed that your truck could reach while going backward, to which another error must be added: the truck accelerated exponentially, reaching a maximum speed of 19.7 undecillion kilometers per hour. In other words, the ability to traverse all the known space by humanity in just a millisecond. It is so much that basically as soon as you accelerated, you could win the game immediately, because the game detected that the truck had become omnipresent and had passed through all the checkpoints at the same time.
In its favor, it must be said that in November 2003 they released a patch to solve one of the most serious problems of the game: the opponent did not move or run against you at any time, so winning was just a matter of time. With the patch, it did start running… but it stopped just before the finish line. No one cared too much, because it was just one error among many: hills were climbed and descended without losing or gaining speed, you could fall into the void when leaving the game map… In short, an absolute disaster that almost surprises that it was able to break a record, even if by accident. Hey, in what other game can you exceed the speed of sound without messing up your hair and reach the edges of the universe in just a millisecond? So much for saying that bugs are worthless.