'I sit in terror looking at the 750,000 wishlists': A nervous dev brings a classic Flash game to Steam

"Moments before this release of Happy Wheels, I sit in terror looking at the 750,000 wishlists statistic.

"I realistically was thinking maybe 5k at best, and then maybe it would gain some momentum as it casually settles into its new environment. After all, the game has been publicly available for 16 years.

"As a 20+ year Steam connoisseur and a game developer with zero contacts in the industry, it's both shocking and supremely welcoming to get this type of reception in the form of this absurd number 2 weeks after adding it to the store. Thank you so much to those that, for some unfathomable reason, still find Happy Wheels at least somewhat interesting."

In 2021 Chrome finally killed Adobe Flash and with it countless fantastic browser games.

That's why it's always great to see a Flash classic survive, like Happy Wheels, the mega-popular ragdoll physics racing game-slash-bloodbath. Its developer, Jim Bonacci, created a Javascript version in 2020 so the classic game could live beyond Chrome and Adobe's murder party, and this week it finally arrived on Steam, too. I'm already having a bloody good time with it:

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.