Wacky Wheels

Wacky Wheels is an arcade kart racing game developed by Beavis Soft and published by Apogee Software in 1994. This game can be described best as a clone of Nintendo's popular Super Mario Kart on the PC. However, it is pretty unique featuring several singleplayer and multiplayer modes with eight playable characters, which are animals from a zoo. The music was composed by Mark Klem, author of various DOOM 2 projects and the Quake 3 total conversion entitled Urban Terror. This game is related to another game, Skunny Kart. Both games base on an early technology demo called Wacky Kart. The developers, Andy Edwardson and Shaun Gadalla, have been inspired by Super Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo. They wrote an engine to display a rotating three-dimensional map on the screen, what has been considered as impossible in that time, because the PC didn't have such a DSP chip to do this fast enough. However, they actually did it and they presented their result to the Copysoft crew. Copysoft was quite excited, but they didn't make a commercial agreement. Edwardson and Gadalla weren't sure if they ever get this game. They came across Apogee and they fought with Copysoft over royalties ending up Apogee distributes the game. The developers just made one mistake: They left the source code on the demo disk which they handed out to Copysoft.