Six Years Later, Bad Rats Is Still Known As Steam's Shittiest Game

Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game
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There are shitty games, and then there are legends. And then there’s Bad Rats.

Bad Rats: The Rats’ Revenge, a not very good physics puzzle game, is all of those things. It’s definitely bad, but it’s somehow evolved into an integral part of Steam culture—a curiosity, a joke, a sly nod shared between conspirators in the middle of The Prank Of The Century. Basically, if someone wants to gift you a godawful game on Steam, odds are, it’s gonna be Bad Rats.

Now, here’s the crazy thing: Bad Rats isn’t actually that bad. In it you solve puzzles using a variety of objects and rats to take revenge on a bunch of Worse Cats. The puzzles are shoddy and the physics are... well, inconsistent is putting it lightly, but I have played shittier games in my time.

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Bad Rats was considered astounding as a result of time and place. It first came out in 2009, back before Greenlight and Early Access transformed Steam into a bubbling morass of uncertainty, an undifferentiated melting pot of games both good and bad. It was, as a result, an oddity. How did a game so putridly awkward make it through Valve’s then-mostly strict selection process? What happened? What went wrong? Nobody really knows, not even now.

Eventually, people decided to run with it, deeming it Steam’s go-to gag gift. But that’s only the first thread-like tail sticking out of this tangled ball of rats. It practically originated the Steam trend of jokingly reviewing a bad game as though it’s the Second Coming. Observe:

Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game
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Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game
Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game

In fact, despite being nearly universally reviled, you’ll note that Bad Rats actually has more positive Steam reviews than negative ones. Of its nearly 8,000 reviews (and remember, Bad Rats came out before Steam reviews were even a thing), 5,454 are positive. But then, it’s beloved by trolls the world over, so what else do you expect? And I mean, read some of the positive ones:

Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game
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Check out Bad Rats’ community and discussion pages, too. The first thing you’ll note is that—even though the game’s been out for six years—they’re still active!

Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game
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The community page is mostly trolling (some of which involves posting full-blown porn, which is definitely against Steam’s terms of service), but the discussion page is a fun mix of in-jokes and newbies wandering in, incredulously asking if Bad Rats is really that bad.

Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game
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Earning all the game’s achievements, meanwhile, is considered a masochistic badge of honor:

Illustration for article titled Six Years Later, iBad Rats/i Is Still Known As Steams Shittiest Game
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I tried finding out how many people now own/play Bad Rats using SteamSpy, but sadly the publisher has declared that information off-limits. Rats! [Editor’s note: Nathan was savagely beaten for this joke. We then had his lips gnawed off by this fish because we don’t have a rat].

It’s a little bit astounding: by being bad—or at least, very not good compared to other Steam offerings at the time—Bad Rats managed to create a lasting community, a goddamn legacy. Despite playing like a shitty tech demo for a puzzle game that aspired to that holiest of grails known as unremarkable mediocrity, it is still relevant in the year 2015—long after even its badness ceased to separate it from the rest of the pack/squirming rat ball. It has retained relevance longer than most good video games, not to mention some great ones. Recent YouTube playthroughs of it have millions of views, and new videos still show up almost daily!

For some reason, someone also made a WikiHow page to serve as a testament to Bad Rats’ badness. If that doesn’t make you relevant, I don’t know what does.

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So naturally, in the year 2015, the future we never asked for, Bad Rats is getting a sequel of some sort. So far all we’ve got to go on is a teaser trailer, which you can see here:

That’s happening. Will it be a disaster, or will it be a masterpiece, Half-Life 3 in all but name? Who fucking knows. But there’s one thing it will never be: the original Bad Rats. Because time has passed and Steam has changed a lot. Bad Rats was a product of a very specific time, a tiny, filthy turd of a miracle. You don’t have to like it (I know I don’t), but you can’t say it’s not special.

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You’re reading Steamed, Kotaku’s page dedicated to all things in and around Valve’s stupidly popular PC gaming service. Games, culture, community creations, criticism, guides, videos—everything. If you’ve found anything cool/awful on Steam, send us an email to let us know.

To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.

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DISCUSSION

The thing that stuck out most to me as a bad design decision was that the game takes place on a 2d plane, but the physics objects all exist in the 3d space. This means that occasionally, instead of a ball going straight when pushed, like its supposed to, parts of the animation of whatever is pushing it will cause it to roll some amount along the z axis, causing it to fall right the hell out of the game world.