Growing up with a PC in the home over a gaming console, most of my early gaming history can be encompassed by tons and tons of shareware floppy disks. For those of you under the age of 30, Shareware is a type of software, most often a floppy disk, that is provided as a sort of demo for a DOS game. While demos nowadays may only consist of a brief level or timed play session, back in the early days, Shareware games allowed for multiple levels (or chapters) of a game to be played.
You may get the first few chapters of a game to sink your teeth into before being shuffled off to an order page that gave you information on how to order the game via good old snail mail. Essentially, shareware allowed small upstart video game companies to get their product out into as many hands as possible for a relatively low-cost. This was of course unheard of in console gaming at the time as the cartridge medium would make for to high a cost and tight control by console manufacturers wouldn’t allow for so-called demos to be released. Your best bet would be to rent a game or thumb through the odd gaming magazine to see if you wanted to get it.
But getting back on track, the game this first feature is on comes from one of the companies that made their bread and butter through the shareware market. I’m talking about Wacky Wheels from Apogee Software, better known today as 3D Realms, the makers of Duke Nukem. Wacky Wheels is itself an MS-DOS kart racer. Well, it’s not technically a kart racer as the game goes out of its way to let you know that the riders are in fact riding lawn mowers, despite what graphically is most definitely go-karts. Developed by Beavis Soft, Wacky Wheels looked to cash in on the Super Mario Kart craze, but it does offer some slight differences. As I only ever played Super Mario Kart at friends homes, Super Nintendo Games were quite expensive for a poor kid with no income, I never really had the pleasure of getting into the game unlike I did with Wacky Wheels until years later.
Strangely enough, I played the Wacky Wheels shareware demo most off of the Duke Nukem 3D CD along with great Raptor. I haven’t seen a game since, that was so groundbreaking like Duke Nukem 3D and yet still offered up tons of amazing demos for other games. Being a PC gamer in those early days really was like nothing else. Beavis Soft didn’t have a repertoire of classic video game characters like Nintendo had for Super Mario Kart, so instead they added eight playable characters in the form of wild animals. Gameplay in Wacky Wheels consisted of driving around a track, each with a different theme, collecting various powerups that can be used against opponents. These powerups don’t have much variety as most just consist of hedgehogs that can be shot at other racers to slow down or distract them. Some of these these powerups are neat, but they can be really difficult to get to land and I just never could get them to hit beyond the lucky shot.
Wacky Wheels had split-screen action so a friend could join in on the fun, but sharing a cramped keyboard doesn’t make for the most easy of experiences. Unlike Mario Kart though, Wacky Wheels gave you the ability to play over a modem or via direct serial link. You could also ditch the racing and just duke it out in a battle mode that gives each player a certain amount of hits before their game is over. The Shareware version of the game only allowed a handful of characters for play as well as locking down most of the tracks, but this didn’t stop me from having hours upon hours of fun behind the keyboard.
Fun Fact: The developers of Wacky Wheels put together a playable demo of the game that they sent to publishers in hopes of acquiring a distribution deal. One of these companies was Copysoft. It just so happens that the playable demo disk included Wacky Wheels source code and while Copysoft rejected the game, the company ended up releasing their own kart racing game just prior to Wacky Wheels hitting market. The developers noted a number of similarities in the two games, but no legal action on the matter was ever taken.
Wacky Wheels is a fantastic game that showed that the PC, even in DOS, could do what those fancy home consoles were doing at the time. If you can grab a copy the game still runs great under DOS Box and it can also be found in the 3D Realms Anthology Pack or on Ebay if you want a physical copy of the game. We hope you enjoyed this brief look back and i’ll see you again soon for another episode of Growing Up DOS here at GAMbIT.
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