WIPEOUT
Ultra Cool Game #8
Type of Game
A futuristic racing game, I think. I don't know—it's going way too fast for me to notice anything.
Release date on our machines
October 1995—at least, I think so. The boxes flew off the shelves faster than the speed of sound.
Developer
Psygnosis Limited—that image of a furious owl will forever remain the best logo in the history of logos.
Publisher
Psygnosis Limited, poor little owl that left us too soon.
WipEout: It used to be available on the Google Play Store and on the PS Vita. But, well, all that’s been gone for ages.
Hey, well! Yeah, once again, thanks to my stepdad for the discovery! Well, actually, thanks to one of his coworkers instead, who clearly didn’t care about this weird game and just gave it to him. I think that’s how I first came across WipEout. I don’t remember anymore. I never really knew, come to think of it. For all I know, my stepdad had some dirt on the guy in question and blackmailed him into giving him some kind of gift: that specific CD-ROM, in other words. I’m speculating; maybe I’m making it up; I’m probably sugarcoating it, since my stepdad never explained to me how or why he’d get his hands on this or that piece of software or video game. But I can’t imagine for a second that he would even decide to acquire a pure gem like WipEout without getting some kind of benefit out of it. Aside from Super Monaco GP on the Mega Drive and Cossacks on Windows XP, I never once saw my stepdad touch a single video game in my presence. Until the mid-2000s, since I didn’t have a computer of my own, I had no choice but to use that of this odious family patriarch. So I was very much at his mercy when it came to the programs available. And at ten years old, whenever I saw an unfamiliar CD-ROM lying around on the PC desk… well, I’d pop it into the drive!
Revolution by Chance
I’ve had some pretty nasty surprises with this method, especially when I stumbled upon stuff that wasn’t at all suitable for kids—if you know what I mean. But this time, just like with Myst or Heroes II, it was a great find. The kind of great find that makes you think your personality has had a “glow-up,” when in reality it’s just altering your cortex for life—and not necessarily for the better. And in this case, WipEout attacked the very foundations of my brain like no other video game before it. No big deal, as long as I still consider it a “glow-up” today.
Wow, that's fast, huh!
Sometimes I wonder if that strange object called a joystick ever really existed. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t use it as well as a keyboard and mouse, or maybe it’s just one of those gadgets that’s inherently poorly designed. Who still uses those clunky things these days, huh? Except for people who are even more pathologically nostalgic than I am? Still, I made an effort for WipEout, because to master anti-gravity ships zooming at 600 km/h while firing missiles at each other on color-saturated tracks, you can’t enjoy a thing without gear as irrational as the game’s concept itself. A lot of my friends had a blast with its sequel, WipEout 2097—on the PlayStation, no less. It was much easier to get the hang of, according to them (and according to me too, actually). But Sony’s console wasn’t going to make its way into my home for quite a while—in the spring of 1998, to be exact, almost three long years after WipEout came out. Can you believe it? An eternity!
So I kept at it, fiddling with that wonky controller that barely stuck to the table with its lousy suction cups. Given the choice between that and missing out on the hype surrounding the super-stylish blockbuster of the moment, I made up my mind quickly. I think that out of about a hundred tries, I must have finished first once or twice… on the first track only! You had to win to advance to the second race, and so on. Needless to say, I never got to see what the third race looked like. When you heard the word “WipEout,” you immediately thought: the future! The future in its craziest, most exhilarating form—too fast, too intense, too fluorescent, too everything. In the ’90s, the obsession with the transition to the third millennium gave rise to concepts that could never have emerged at any other time. And yes, that’s an objective, proven, and indisputable fact.
If my neurosis—stuck in that decade—tells you so, it must be right. The incredible ship designs, the colorful team names, the drivers’ wild faces, the garish billboards, the instantly recognizable font, the kanji written everywhere just like in Blade Runner… Landscapes transformed into dizzying anti-gravity tracks, the stands packed with wild spectators. OK, the graphics didn’t let you make out all those details, but we were used to it. No one has ever created such a cohesive universe in any other video game, except in the sequels to this now-cult franchise—and even that’s debatable. Yeah, that’s the second objective, proven, and indisputable fact. I’ve got plenty more up my sleeve, just in case I haven’t convinced the whole world yet. For example, the power-ups—which aren’t exactly groundbreaking, featuring missiles, homing missiles, mines, shields…—but the icons that pop up on the screen when you pick up one of these items? WOW!
Too beautiful, too stylish, too… iconic, HAHA! Seriously, a ton of research went into the art direction. Coming up with brands for anti-gravity ships, giving them designs and colors just like real manufacturers would in real life, creating logos not only for the vehicles but also for their drivers… they even turned all that graphic research into a book, and it’s totally worth it. I devoured that big volume, and I feel a certain pride seeing it take up the space of ten novels on the living room bookshelf. Even with the terrible resolutions of the time, the cool factor oozed from every pixel, instantly vaporized by the super-powerful engines of the FEISAR LS-5600 Mk.IV. Or those of Qirex, Auricom, or AG Systems—it wouldn’t make a difference. Even the icons for the power-ups you collect during races give me shivers of nostalgia.
BPM: Broken, Passionate, Matrixed
If I stuck with this game for so long even though I was absolutely terrible at it, I owe it all to the music that I ABSOLUTELY LOVED! I’m talking about the soundtrack composed by the artist Tim Wright, a.k.a. Cold Storage—or rather, CoLD SToRAGE, in MySpace lingo. On PC, the disc contained nothing but his own compositions. No Orbital, no Chemical Brothers… I’ve sometimes read or heard people making fun of these tracks—which were specifically created to accompany our suicidal escapades—arguing that they didn’t hold a candle to the work of better-known artists. I absolutely DISAGREE! You bunch of two-bit killjoys—I’ll stick your heads on an acceleration tile on the Terramax course to see if it peels your skin off. It probably would. But seriously, I don’t need anything other than this exhilarating trance to drive me completely nuts. And there’s nothing better than an O.S.T. composed specifically for a game, rather than tracks cobbled together from here and there—no matter how awesome they may be. It reinforces the game’s identity—that’s all there is to it. Well, that’s just my opinion, but it’s an objective, proven, and indisputable one nonetheless. Before WipEout, techno seemed to me like a nice musical genre, but a very obscure one that was a bit out of reach. After WipEout, I swore by it. Techno music : an unstoppable wave of hype, a source of incredible emotions, a transmitter of infinite energy. A phenomenon far greater than music itself, but if I start arguing about that, I’ll end up pouring all my energy into it—and I’ll never get around to telling you what I really want to say. This album has left a mark on me like few other things in my life have; both the high-energy passages that give you a massive boost, and the dark loops—always tinged with a touch of madness—that teach you to love depression. Both moods sometimes come together in the same track, as the piece listed at the bottom of this paragraph illustrates perfectly. Even today, I listen to this O.S.T. as a work in its own right, not just as a video game soundtrack. And it still fills me with the same intense emotions, as if I were rediscovering trance for the first time. Even on the train on my way to work, even while walking the dog in the woods, even when I lock myself in the basement at night to cry… oops, I didn’t say anything. As soon as I realized that all I had to do was pop the CD into a stereo to succumb to the frenetic charm of these tracks from another dimension, I pretty quickly gave up on the game. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I couldn’t finish a single race. The joystick finally gathered dust, just as it deserved. I dug it out again for Wing Commander IV, but after that—I promise—I never touched it again.
Traveling at the Speed of Laser
The CD-ROM, a rapidly expanding medium in 1995, could store far more data than floppy disks. I hope I’m not telling anyone over the age of eleven and a half anything they don’t already know by stating the obvious. Among the many improvements that resulted from this invention, was the inclusion of “conventional” music tracks in games: songs composed just like any other music, basically. It was a true revolution compared to the limitations imposed by the old consoles, whose cartridges weren’t much better than floppy disks. This rendered the MIDI format obsolete within a few years, which I regret today from a strictly pathological, melancholic perspective. But at the time, I welcomed this progress with open arms. WipEout literally changed my life, since it also introduced me to electronic music! Okay, it didn’t change my life—it just made it a thousand times cooler. Truth be told, I was already familiar with it without realizing it, if only through other games like Streets of Rage, or almost any hit playing on NRJ or Fun Radio.
But this time, I was really falling in love, and I much prefer this scenario to any other—like one involving a carnival or an ice rink, for example. It was a close call, huhuhu. For me, WipEout remains the spark that set my whole being ablaze, that made me dream of endless nights filled with tracks whose heady beats drive you wild with joy. A first step that gradually erases childhood and makes way for adolescence. I’d still play with G.I. Joe and Dino Riders for a while longer, but by then, my love for the nightlife was already quietly taking root in my mind, never to leave me again. Eventually, it did leave me—out of sheer necessity, just so I could lead a socially acceptable life—but it’s still lurking deep inside my head, ready to resurface at the first opportunity. I really tried not to recount my love at first sight with techno in a pompous and sappy way, but I failed. Sometimes you just have to learn to reclaim that sentimentality.
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