Happy Wheels Launches on Steam After 750,000 Wishlists and Hits 95% Positive Reviews

Happy Wheels has launched on Steam more than 16 years after the physics-based sandbox game first appeared online, arriving with 750,000 wishlists and a strong early response from players.

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• The Steam version launched on September 21. As of September 28, 95% of 2,062 English-language Steam reviews are positive, giving the game an Overwhelmingly Positive rating.

The size of the pre-release interest caught creator Jim Bonacci by surprise. In his launch post, he said he had expected the newly created Steam page to attract around 5,000 wishlists before potentially gaining more attention over time.

Instead, the total reached 750,000 within two weeks of the store page going live. Bonacci also warned at launch that the game's database servers could face heavier traffic than expected as players returned to a title that had already been publicly available for years.

The figure measures Steam wishlists rather than sales, but it gave Happy Wheels a substantial audience before the new version became available.

The Steam release keeps the user-created levels and editing tools that have been central to Happy Wheels since its browser days. Players can access more than five million community-made levels, browse daily submissions and create their own courses with the Level Editor.

Bonacci has also added features specifically for the Steam version. These include 80 achievements, Steam Cloud support, controller support, downloadable levels for offline play and the ability to link an existing Happy Wheels account to a Steam ID. A new date filter in the Level Browser makes it possible to search older community creations directly, while the Steam version removes advertisements.

The Steam release is priced at $4.99. The existing browser version also remains available through Totaljerkface, giving players the option to continue playing outside Steam.

Development has continued immediately after release. Version 1.99.1 arrived on September 22 with reduced input latency, fixes for non-standard controllers, a Linux startup crash and a memory leak. Bonacci also replaced an achievement that required players to publish a level after it contributed to a flood of achievement-focused submissions in the Level Browser.

Version 1.99.2 followed on September 26, fixing duplicate or ghost windows on Windows 11 and problems with the Steam Overlay on Linux. It also adjusted another achievement and added a dedicated Steam forum for sharing custom levels.

Bonacci said at launch that further work is planned for controller and Steam Deck support, offline functionality, achievements and general bug fixes as the Steam version continues to develop.