Wipeout is the first in a series of futuristic racing games developed and published by Psygnosis in 1995 for Sony PlayStation and PC, in 1996 for the Sega Saturn. Wipeout was designed in part by The Designers Republic, while the game’s vehicle designs were based on Matrix Marauders, a 3D grid-based strategy game whose concept was developed by Psygnosis employee Jim Bowers. Nick Burcombe, the game’s future designer, was inspired to create a racing game using the same types of vehicles from his experience with Powerdrome, F-Zero and Super Mario Kart. [Info from Wikipedia]
In the gallery below you can see a couple fo screens from a beta version and what is seems a FMV / target render.
Beta:
Final:
In an interview on Grumpy Old Gamers with Andy Satterthwaite we can read some memories from the early days of Wipeout:
As for the “Inspiration” the original game was very much “Mario Kart” to techno music. Nick Burcombe and Jim Bowers had designed the game from those beginnings; and an early concept video was made.
Wipeout Target Render / Concept Video:
Thanks to Rod_Wod and Celine for the scans! Thanks to Ross Sillifant for the interview!
Images:
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(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Mike Clarke (Psygnosis)
I’m not quite sure what happened to be honest, (with Damocles on PC)
but it was around/just after
the time that Psygnosis was sold to Sony, and it seemed apparent that
everything apart from Playstation stuff (this was when we got the HUGE
prototype Playstation and had a group working on it) was not worth the
bother. As far as I remember it was in development for quite a long time. We
were also going to release Tir Na Nog on the PC as well (anyone remember
that from the Spectrum?), and also about 4 SNES games and some Megdrive
stuff in development.
I know that the console stuff got put under Sony’s jurisdiction for them to
decide what to do with them. I think the whole lot got canned. Maybe the PC
stuff went the same way, I’m not sure, but it seems very likely. Psygnosis
was bought to develop stuff for the Playstation and after all those products
disappeared, that’s pretty much what we did. And very badly we did it too.
You should have seen the state of the stuff we were doing. It was awful.
Both Wipeout and Krazy Ivan were in development as our first products and
they both were terrible. So much so that the MD called all of the developers
into a room and told us that it was just not on and they’d better improve or
some people will be out of a job. And good thing he did too. He was
absolutely right. I used to try to explain to people how awful they were,
but being a musician, of course, what did I know?