Bad Day on the Midway — The Residents' carnival, on a 1995 Mac Runs here
1995 · The Residents, Jim Ludtke, The Cryptic Corporation (published by Inscape) · System 7 · Mini vMac (Mac II) · 640×480 at 8-bit colour
Guide updated October 2026
Yes: Bad Day on the Midway runs free in your browser on this page. Press Start and it boots System 7 on an emulated Mac II, with no download, no plugin and no account. Controls: Click a place (walk there, or into a ride, booth or tent), Click a visible character (jump into their head and play as them).
It is one in the afternoon at a run-down carnival, and you are Timmy, ten years old, with a midway full of rides, freak-show tents and sideshow booths ahead of you. Everyone you pass is thinking out loud, in lines of text that drift along the bottom of the screen, and most of what they are thinking is not what a ten-year-old should hear.
Bad Day on the Midway was written and directed by The Residents, the anonymous San Francisco art-rock group, drawn by Jim Ludtke and published by Inscape in November 1995. This is the Macintosh side of the original CD, running on an emulated Macintosh II under System 7.5.3 with QuickTime 2.5.
System 7.5.3 starts and opens the carnival by itself. The screen then goes black with a small eye and "Loading…" for a minute or so while the first films come off the disc; leave it, the intro follows. After that, click where you want to go.
Controls
| Mouse | Everything: the cursor changes shape to show what a click will do |
| Click a place | Walk there, or into a ride, booth or tent |
| Click a visible character | Jump into their head and play as them |
| Captions (bottom) | The thoughts of whoever you are playing |
In March 2022 the copyright holder, The Cryptic Corporation, and Inscape's former CEO Michael L. Nash let Bad Day on the Midway go free, on condition that nobody charges for it. That release is Max Wegner's Bad Day on the Midway package, linked from The Residents' own site; this page runs the original Macintosh CD instead, free of charge. Full reasoning is in notices/bad-day-on-the-midway.md, and the takedown promise applies without argument.
Archives and originals
- Bad Day on the Midway package by Max Wegner: the free 2022 release for modern Windows and macOS, authorised by the rights holders.
- Internet Archive: the preserved hybrid CD this copy comes from.
How it works & what to expect
| Machine | Macintosh II, 640×480, 256 colours |
|---|---|
| System | System 7.5.3 with QuickTime 2.5 |
| Emulator | Mini vMac, compiled to WebAssembly |
| Disc | The original 1995 hybrid CD, Macintosh partition |
| Saves | None; a visit runs from 1 pm to midnight and starts fresh each time |
The game is a Macromedia Director projector. It runs here on an emulated colour Macintosh II, which runs its 68k code, the same way The Museum of Anything Goes does. Every film, sound and scene is read straight off the emulated CD drive, so the first view of each place can take a moment to arrive, as it did on a double-speed drive in 1995.
How you play
There are no puzzles to solve in the usual sense and no inventory. You walk the midway by clicking, ride the rides, and listen. The trick of the game is that you are not stuck being Timmy: whenever another character is on screen you can click on them and take over, seeing the carnival through their eyes and reading their thoughts instead.
Each of them wants something. Dixie runs the shooting gallery and owns the midway; Jocko is her foreman and lover; Ted is a killer who lives with his mother Lottie; Oscar is a rat carrying a plague. Following one character for a while, then jumping into another, is how the story comes together. A clock runs from one in the afternoon to midnight, several characters can die, and there is more than one ending. Timmy is safe from most of the deaths, which makes him a good body to come back to.
Why people look for it now
Bad Day on the Midway was praised on release and then went missing for a quarter of a century: the CD was made for Windows 3.1 and the classic Mac OS, and it stopped running on either long ago. It survived as a cult object among Residents fans and in lists of the strangest CD-ROMs of the 1990s, and Ron Howard's company once optioned it as a television series for David Lynch.
In 2022 its owners made it free, and fans built a package around an emulated Windows 3.1. This page is the other half: the Macintosh version, as it ran on a Mac, with nothing to install.
Questions people ask
Is this the real Bad Day on the Midway?
Yes: the 1995 Inscape CD-ROM by The Residents, running from the Macintosh side of the original disc on an emulated Macintosh II.
Is Bad Day on the Midway free?
Yes. In 2022 the copyright holder, The Cryptic Corporation, and Inscape's former CEO allowed it to be given away, as long as nobody charges for it. The fans' download for modern Windows and macOS is at wegneronline.com/badday.
Why is the screen black with "Loading…" at the start?
The game is reading its first films off the emulated CD. It takes about a minute; the intro follows by itself.
How do I switch characters?
Click on a character while they are on screen. You take them over, and the captions at the bottom become their thoughts.
Is it suitable for children?
No. Timmy is a child, but the game is a dark comedy for adults, with a serial killer, death scenes and a lot of grim humour.
Put Bad Day on the Midway on your own site
Free, no permission needed and no account. Paste this where you want the machine to appear; it brings its own emulator and asks nothing of your page.
<iframe src="https://macemu.com/embed/bad-day-on-the-midway/"
width="640" height="480"
style="border:0;max-width:100%"
allowfullscreen
title="Bad Day on the Midway"></iframe>Sized to this title's real screen. How embedding works.
