A nice memoir from the in-staff Psygnosis writer who created the WipeOut Universe. Expect my own memoir of playing WipeOut when Popular gets to the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” (NB I was rubbish at it but I loved it anyway).
“That’s back-stories for you. For the most part they’re like radio waves – always there but undetected. And as mostly happens, when the game stumbles, or flops entirely, the back-story’s faint ripples ebb further and further and further away, and no one tunes in, and no one cares to listen, and no one wonders how a particular forgotten universe ever came to be.”
(via Infovore)
I think he’s got it right – WipeOut was the first time I recall that video games really felt cool (in culture, rather than just our heads), and is indirectly responsible (along with a good image of what the PlayStation meant, now completely gone) for its ascendancy.
Also the mentions of the techno tracks that he slipped into the naming reminds me that one of my favourite parts of the the experience was the impression that you can be partake of this general area of coolness without actually being a club kid going out every weekend (or in my case any weekend).
Wipeout arrived just at the tail-end of “futurism” as a somewhat agreed-upon gestalt for rave music. Smart drinks, electronic sunglasses that pulsed light rhythmically through your eyelids as you reclined on some cheap chaise longue in the grotty corner of a conference center that had been turned into a rave for one night only, pitch-perfect parodies of corporate logos that dotted rave flyers (and which also found their way into this game as the logos for the different “teams”) — all of this was already cracking against the reef of something else