James Anthony Bonacci (born September 27, 1979 aged 35, better known as Jim Bonacci) is the creator of Total Jerkface, Divine Intervention, Happy Wheels, GameTest12 and the Flash movies Beautiful Day and Where's My Bike?. Jim lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York.
Developing Flash in early 2002, he made an animated movie on Newgrounds called Oh Beautiful Day and then another one in 2003 titled Where's My Bike?. Later in 2003, he started learning ActionScript and made a Flash game called Divine Intervention. The game was his first major success in the world of Flash games and has about 6 million views on Newgrounds alone. After releasing Divine Intervention, Jim realized that making Flash games was the thing he wanted to do and spend more time on, because it perfectly combined his interests in art and programming. A couple of years later (around 2006) he opened his site, totaljerkface.com (not the one as we know today). The website was built in Flash, and included a very limited amount of unappealing features. He included a Flash application that allowed users to ask him questions, which he publicly later answered.
He also added an interactive head there (different than the one on the site today), which would say something in a computerized voice if you put your cursor over it, much like the one on the current site.
In about 2006, he started working on Happy Wheels. Jim Bonacci was working at a Flash advertising job with Jason Schymick when he quit to start fully focusing on his "new game". Jim said that he spent 4 years making it, including rewriting the game in different programming languages. Originally, Happy Wheels was made for fun, it only contained Wheelchair Guy, and the first level, Happy Green Hills. After it gained some popularity, he made it into what the game is now, and published it to his website on June 4th, 2010. When creating Happy Wheels, Jim realized that creating all of the levels himself would take too long, so he opened up the Level Editor where users could create their own content. At about this time, Jim switched from working on Happy Wheels full time and part time. Jim then started to work on a fighting game, but he realized it was too ambitious to finish in a reasonable amount of time.
On November 13th, 2012, Jim announced he is "creating a new version of Happy Wheels from scratch". Unlike the online Flash version, this version will be written in C++, contain much more detailed graphics, and is downloaded rather than played online. Jim stated it will be free, but to make levels, you must pay $5 - 10.
At PAX East 2013, Jim showed a demo version of the upcoming mobile version of Happy Wheels.
Let's play Happy Wheel at http://happywheelsaz.net/ to have a happy time and your will realize why so many people love this game.
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