WipEout began, its designer Nick Burcombe told Edge, “in time-honoured fashion — down the pub”, with an old Amiga racing game called Powerdrome that he thought had been a good idea before its time. By the end of 1995 it was the game people bought with their PlayStations. When Sony’s console reached Europe on 29 September 1995, WipEout outsold Namco’s Ridge Racer, and its craft, its typography by the Sheffield design studio The Designers Republic and its dance soundtrack became part of how Sony sold the machine to people who had stopped playing games. Edge called it a “landmark”, less because it was the best racing game than because it sat where “videogaming and music culture” met.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Psygnosis, Liverpool, owned by Sony since 1993.
- Released: 29 September 1995 with the European PlayStation; later for the PC and the Sega Saturn.
- Designer: Nick Burcombe. Producer: Dominic Mallinson. Team leader: Nicky Carus-Westcott.
- Graphic design: The Designers Republic.
- Music: Tim Wright as CoLD SToRAGE, with licensed tracks by Leftfield, Orbital and the Chemical Brothers.
- Series: from WipEout 2097 (1996) to WipEout 2048 (2012).
Making it
Edge visited the team in the spring of 1995 and printed its credits: game designer Nick Burcombe, producer Dominic Mallinson, team leader Nicky Carus-Westcott, programmer Stewart Sockett, and artists including Jim Bowers and Louise Smith. Wireframe later put the group at ten or so developers. They built the craft and courses in Softimage on Silicon Graphics workstations. Each track was drawn on paper with its scenery and heights, modelled in 3D, test-flown on the PlayStation and then trimmed so the player could never see far enough ahead to catch the scenery being drawn.
Burcombe wanted the player to feel in control in three dimensions. His craft float on a magnetic cushion above the track, with hills, drops and jumps; fly off the course and a recovery ship picks you up with a tractor beam, at the cost of time. The same rendered craft appeared on a larger screen before the game was finished: Psygnosis made a high-resolution sequence of WipEout for the MGM film Hackers (1995), in which the heroes play it.
Playing it
The player races for one of four teams in the F3600 league, whose craft trade top speed against handling and weight. According to the team’s own guide in Computer and Video Games, the light Feisar craft bounced off walls and suited beginners, while Auricom and Qirex were “reserved for pilots who have a death wish”. There are six tracks, set in Canada, Germany, Japan, Russia and elsewhere, then six harder night-time versions in the faster Rapier class, and a secret track after those. Arrows on the track surface give a burst of speed; other markings hand out one-shot weapons, which Edge saw as a nod to Super Mario Kart. On the tighter courses the craft need twin air brakes, one for each side, to get round the corners. Two players could race by linking two PlayStations.
Edge gave it eight out of ten in October 1995. It found the sense of speed “exhilarating” and the graphics “the most impressive yet seen on the PlayStation”, and thought the simple championship and reliance on track power-ups limited how long the game would last.
The look and the sound
Psygnosis had always made its games’ pictures and music itself. For WipEout, Carus-Westcott said, “we managed to persuade people to spend some of the budget on getting other people in”. People in the Psygnosis art department were fans of The Designers Republic, a Sheffield studio founded in 1986 and known for record sleeves for Warp and Pop Will Eat Itself. The studio’s founder, Ian Anderson, wanted to avoid what he saw as the usual games box, with fantasy lettering and a screenshot, and designed the logos and the weapon icons in the game as well as the packaging.
Burcombe, whose clubbing friends played games, wanted dance music: “a dance music soundtrack is the only thing that would have suited an ultra-fast game with attitude.” The in-house music was written by Tim Wright under the name CoLD SToRAGE. To it Sony’s music catalogue added tracks from Leftfield, a remix of “Afro-Left”, and the Chemical Brothers, and Orbital recorded a new track. Burcombe took a video of the game to Orbital’s studio, and Paul Hartnoll said writing to it was “like writing music for Thunderbirds”. A compilation album of music from the game reached the top 30, according to Edge. The licensed tracks did not survive the move to the Saturn, whose version used in-house music instead.
Selling the PlayStation
Sony’s European marketing aimed the PlayStation at people aged about 15 to 24 who had grown out of their 16-bit consoles, and went through the style press and the clubs. Geoff Glendenning of Sony Computer Entertainment described to Edge how it covered the Glastonbury festival in PlayStation flyers and set up a room of PlayStations at London’s Ministry of Sound club. WipEout, with its club music and its designer packaging, was the game that fitted that campaign best. On launch day the Liverpool branch of the shop chain Game ran a WipEout promotion. By April 1996, Psygnosis’s Glen O’Connell told Edge, the game had sold 60,000 copies in Britain, more than half the country’s PlayStation owners, and over 250,000 across Europe, making it the company’s most successful game made in-house.
The series
A sequel was, Edge said, inevitable. Psygnosis avoided the name Wipeout 2 as too predictable, and WipEout 2097 came out in 1996, again with The Designers Republic. WipEout 64 for the Nintendo 64 followed in 1998 and Wip3out in 1999. As Psygnosis became Sony’s Studio Liverpool, the team made WipEout Fusion for the PlayStation 2 (2002), WipEout Pure for the PSP (2005), WipEout Pulse (2007), WipEout HD (2008) and WipEout 2048 for the PlayStation Vita in 2012. Sony closed Studio Liverpool in August 2012. The WipEout Omega Collection of 2017 gathered the later games for the PlayStation 4, and in 2022 Wireframe noted that no new WipEout had appeared in the decade since, leaving independent studios to make anti-gravity racers in its image.
Sources
- Edge issue 21, June 1995, pp. 24–27: preview (team credits; Powerdrome; the magnetically suspended craft and tractor beam; Softimage and the track-building process; the Hackers sequence; The Designers Republic).
- Edge issue 25, October 1995, pp. 62–63: review (six Venom and six Rapier tracks, air brakes, speed-ups and weapons, the link-up game; eight out of ten).
- Edge issue 27, December 1995, p. 6: the European PlayStation launch on 29 September 1995; WipEout outselling Ridge Racer; the Game promotion in Liverpool.
- Computer and Video Games issue 168, November 1995, pp. 67–70: the team’s guide (the F3600 league, the four teams, the tracks and their locations, the secret track).
- Edge issue 31, April 1996, pp. 58–66, “nuGame culture”: Sony’s marketing, Glastonbury and the Ministry of Sound; the WipEout feature (Burcombe on the pub and dance music; sales figures from Glen O’Connell; The Designers Republic and Ian Anderson; Nicky Carus-Westcott; Orbital and Paul Hartnoll; Leftfield’s “Afro-Left”; the album in the top 30).
- Edge issue 32, May 1996, p. 5: Tim Wright, “aka Cold Storage”, as WipEout’s musician. Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998: Wright’s work on the series as Cold Storage.
- Sega Saturn Magazine issue 21, July 1997, p. 13, and Computer and Video Games issue 190, September 1997, p. 74: the Saturn versions without the licensed music.
- Edge issue 33, June 1996, p. 51: WipEout 2097 and the name. Edge issue 72, June 1999: Wip3out.
- Wireframe issue 66, September 2022, pp. 28–29: “ten or so developers”; no new game since WipEout 2048.
- Wikipedia, “Wipeout (video game)” and “Wipeout (video game series)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the PC and Saturn release dates; release years of WipEout 64, Fusion, Pulse, HD and the Omega Collection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipeout_(video_game)