Phil’s Wacky Wheels Site

Screenshot of an edited track
A quick edit to WACKY.DAT

This site is about Wacky Wheels, a DOS racing game (similar to Mario Kart) released by Apogee (3D Realms) on 17 October 1994. You can find every Wacky Wheels cheat code, a way to jump over the walls, and lots of other information about Wacky Wheels. You can get the shareware version from the downloads page.

The screen shot shows the result of a quick edit to WACKY.DAT: a section of wall is missing. For some ideas on how to edit WACKY.DAT yourself, see editing wacky.dat.

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29 Sep 2021

Hey everyone, Rees here! An archive.org Wayback Machine copy of this legendary fan site is linked from Apogee's legacy Wacky Wheels page, but as with many Wayback Machine sites, a lot of the links are sadly broken. This mirror is my attempt to preserve and even reconstruct the useful information and downloads very kindly made available here - I have even been tracking down as many of the original files as possible, with some success. Unfortunately I'm not sure who "Yellow Ant Phil" is and I haven't been able to get in touch, but no copyright infringement is intended and all credit for the content here must go to the original author - please contact me if you're Phil and you're not OK with this. Thanks!

24 Apr 2015

The Wacky Wheels remake is now on Steam Greenlight. It needs more votes to become available on Steam for Windows and Mac. Also, Cascadia Games made a new blog post about the remake a few days ago.

2 Mar 2015

Cascadia Games just updated their website for the Wacky Wheels remake: Wacky Wheels Racing.

27 Feb 2015

Cascadia Games posted another video of the Wacky Wheels remake. This one shows more of the game, and is definitely worth watching. Cascadia said that even Scott Miller (founder of Apogee) and Andy Edwardson (the programmer of Wacky Wheels) enjoyed the video.

11 Feb 2015

Cascadia Games has resumed working on the Wacky Wheels remake after some time off. They posted a video yesterday showing their progress.

24 Oct 2014

3D Realms has come back to life under new management. They recently reduced the price of Wacky Wheels to US $4.99. Wacky Wheels is also included in the new 3D Realms Anthology. They also have a pack of “re-rockestrated” music, including a remixed version of Dream from Wacky Wheels.

3 Oct 2014

Cascadia Games has another blog post about the progress of the Wacky Wheels remake. The new target release date is by the end of the year, pushed back from this month, but it looks like they’re making good progress.

1 Oct 2014

Wacky Wheels music

Just in time for the 20th anniversary of Wacky Wheels, The Florana Princess told me about her remix of the Wacky Wheels track “Brick Wall.” Now seems like a good time to mention that I have a Wacky Wheels music page. It’s been there for years, but I never got around to linking to it from anywhere. You can download all Wacky Wheels music, plus a number of remixes and live performances.

24 Aug 2014

3D Realms made Wacky Wheels available on gog.com last Thursday.

27 May 2014

Here is a blog post from Cascadia Games about the upcoming Wacky Wheels remake.

24 May 2014

Wacky Wheels remake, coming soon

Cascadia Games is working on a licensed remake to Wacky Wheels for iOS. They have also mentioned possibly releasing it for Mac OS, Windows, and Android—possibly even (desktop) Linux. Here is a video and a screenshot from the game. You can follow Cascadia Games on Twitter for news. The iOS version should be released later this year.

19 Mar 2010

Mark Klem, who wrote the music to Wacky Wheels, just sent me a link to a video of a percussion orchestra performing Ashes, the main menu music in Wacky Wheels. You can watch it here. [Update 1 Oct 2014: the video is no longer posted on YouTube.]

5 Jun 2009

3D Realms store reopens

As it turns out, 3D Realms is still in business, although very few people work there now. The online store was closed for a while, but it was relaunched today. The new store has more games available, and the games come with DOSBox wrappers, which makes it easier to run the games in Windows. The prices have been reduced, so now you can get Wacky Wheels for US $6. They no longer ship products on CD-ROM; all games are downloadable only.

7 May 2009

The official word from 3D Realms is that you can no longer buy any products on CD-ROM. Games are still available as downloads (including Wacky Wheels), but there is no guarantee that they will be available for long. If you’ve been putting off buying Wacky Wheels, I recommend you do it now: buy3drealms.com.

6 May 2009

3D Realms goes out of business

3D Realms closed its doors today. There aren’t many details available yet, so I don’t know how this affects the future of Wacky Wheels. I just checked and it is no longer possible to order Wacky Wheels on CD-ROM. It is still available as a download from 3D Realms. I’ll post further details that pertain to Wacky Wheels as they become available.

23 Apr 2009

3D Realms just released scans of all of their old print manuals as PDF downloads. You can get the Wacky Wheels manual here. Other manuals are at the 3D Realms website.

26 Sep 2008

New location for the website

I just moved this site from its old location (http://phil.maddogcarter.com/wacky_wheels) to a new domain name, yellowantphil.com, so update your bookmarks if necessary. By the way, I know there haven’t been any site updates in a long time but they’re still coming, once I get around to it…

2 Jul 2007

I’m going to make some updates to this site pretty soon, but for now, head over to the 3D Realms forums for some screen shots of a very early version of Wacky Wheels.

23 Oct 2006

3D Realms/Apogee just released a scan of an old Wacky Wheels advertisement. You can download it here. More old advertising for Apogee games will be posted in a series, so we may see more old Wacky Wheels advertising in the next few weeks.

19 Aug 2006

I updated multiple pages of the site, mostly expanding the history and troubleshooting pages.

6 Aug 2006

Szevvy’s website, home of the Wombat game tools, is back up, this time at szevvy.net. [Edit 10 Nov 2010: the website moved back to szevvy.com at some point.]

19 May 2006

Help us find out how to do a turbo start!

Recently, several people on the 3D Realms Forums have reported being able to get a turbo boost at the start of a race without using the turbo startup code. The trouble is, no one remembers quite how to do it. See this thread at the 3D Realms forums for more information. If you can figure out how to do it, or remember having done it before, post a message on that thread or email me. Fame and fabulous riches await the first person to figure it out. Well, maybe.

28 Apr 2006

It looks like Szevvy’s website is down at the moment. He made the Wombat Game Tools. Hopefully he will get his site back up, but in the meantime, here’s a copy of Wombat Game Tools 0.4a in case you need it. [Edit 9 May 2009: I removed the link. A new version of Wombat Game Tools is available at szevvy.com.]

4 Apr 2006

I have several things I need to update on this site, but I never seem to have time to do it, but anyway, 3D Realms just posted an interview with Andy Edwardson, the programmer of Wacky Wheels. It has a bit of new information about the development of Wacky Wheels, and Andy’s thoughts on 3D Realms. Check it out here.

21 Mar 2005

I took the down the forum from this site. It was only there because I had to have it for my web programming class, but that’s over now. Frenkel already posted to the forum with some links, so I’ll put his post here for now: [Edit 19 Aug 2006: I moved these links to the history and dopefish source code pages.]

12 Mar 2005

I just found an mp3 that’s a remix of one of the songs in Wacky Wheels (Ashes). It sounds pretty good so download it or see the site where I found it. [Update 26 Feb 2009: this remix was made by The Orichalcon.]

8 Mar 2005

Version 2 of the site is now finished. (Version 1 was written in HTML and has no dynamic content.) I have more plans for updates, but until then, enjoy the site.