Wild Wheels

When a game about noisy racing across a collapsed planet appeared in the nineties, hardly anyone cared. Wild Wheels was just another piece in the pile of arcade racing games that accumulated on DOS like grass in a meadow. Yet that was exactly where its charm lay — it didn't get anything and paid no mind to anything.

It is a simple racing arcade on PC where you drive a crazy vehicle through several scenes full of obstacles, enemy cars and absurd details. It isn't a simulator, nor strategy — it is pure adrenaline with no explanations. You grab the wheel, hit the gas and try to survive. The goal is basic — reach the finish, if your vehicle feels like letting you.

The controls are straightforward, sometimes to the point of frustration. There's no time for subtle maneuvers — you either make it or you don't. The physics are what they were on PC in 1990: the vehicle drives you wild, it may behave as if it were on ice, or it catches on the smallest bump. Whether it is fun or pain depends on us, on how we take it. The graphics are pastel, loud and weird. The sounds are chopped-off and scratched, as if someone were banging on a tin can — all of which makes the game far stranger than it was meant to be.

Today it is more of a curiosity. It isn't a game you'd play for the result, more because you want to know how the nineties imagined “fun without meaning”. It has aged matter-of-factly, without regret. Nobody will chase those advanced times anymore — there are better arcade racing games out there. But as a small piece of DOS gaming history it is interesting.

It's worth playing if you want to feel what it was like when graphics lagged behind imagination and the sound stayed stuck in the seventies. It isn't a masterpiece, but it isn't a complete failure either. It is simply a weird, loud, slightly endearing thing that believes in its own absurdity.