30 years ago Sony and WipEout used nightclub culture to transform gaming’s image

Favourite WipEout game?

  • WipEout (1995)

    Votes: 32 19.0%
  • WipEout 2097 (1996)

    Votes: 55 32.7%
  • Wip3out (1999)

    Votes: 15 8.9%
  • WipEout Fusion (2001)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • WipEout Pure (2005)

    Votes: 6 3.6%
  • WipEout HD (2008)

    Votes: 23 13.7%
  • WipEout Pulse (2009)

    Votes: 1 0.6%
  • WipEout Omega Collection (2017)

    Votes: 33 19.6%
  • WipEout 2048 (2012)

    Votes: 3 1.8%

  • Total voters
    168
Back in 1995 the state of gaming in the UK was beginning to feel a bit stale.

Nintendo were very much in the children's entertainment market in which they found success in the 80s and, while they skewed towards a teen audience, Sega were pretty much in the same camp.

Sony, who were not only looking to dominate the market, but take it mainstream knew that they'd have to capture a much bigger market.

Enter WipEout, developed by Psygnosis, a very much established UK studio, a game that very well may have ended up as simply a 3D version of F-Zero, instead became the catalyst for a gaming revolution.

While rock was still thriving in America, in the UK and Europe the rock scene had largely died out. Britpop (Oasis, Blur, Pulp) was very much a last hurrah for the ailing rock genre. For many teens and 20 somethings, the rave and club scene was dominant. In order to capture this market, Sony went all in on marketing with razor precision.


Design

The cool "Y2K aesthetic", the interface's futuristic font, these were no accident.

Sony brought the Designer's Republic on board. Designer's Republic who had produced cover art for artists like including Autechre, LFO and Aphex Twin brought with them an aesthetic that you'd typically find on nightclub billboards.




Sound

The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Orbital, Leftfield and Underworld were all huge in the mid 90s clubbing scene. Coupled with the emergence of CD-quality audio Sony used their huge record business to brilliant effect, perfectly capturing the culture of British youth




Marketing

While certainly not the reason for PlayStation's success in the 90s, no one can deny that Sony absolutely nailed this aspect in the UK and Europe. They deliberately targeted 20 year olds while Nintendo and Sega were still aiming their advertising at kids. Images of people seemingly overdosing on drugs (in a similar fashion to the anti-drugs adverts you'd find in magazines) was completely original and certainly drew attention.

Unauthentic advertising was later banned.




Product placement

So, finally, how do you get the product to the target audience? Nightclubs of course! Sony made deals with big nightclubs like London's Ministry of Sound and Liverpool's Cream to place PlayStation demo pods in "chill out" rooms and toilets while you queued for a piss. Needless to say this outside-the-box thinking worked wonders

 
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First time I experienced a playstation was.i. the business nightclub in Blackpool. Had two of them outside the doors...stopped by to.play a quick game,.ended up playing for two hours..😅
 
They were really big on Dance/House music and Rave culture back then.

Not sure whats big there now maybe Sharia Law

Illegal raves have skyrocketed since lockdown, funnily enough even the music sounds like it did in the early 90s

I've seen articles suggest the "E" in WipEout stood for Ecstacy (it was actually due to lowercase "e" not fitting the lettering template)

 
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IMO 3 was better the 2097. played a lot of 3 not long ago.

WipEout 3 had huge marketing in 1999 (the year of trance)

DJ Sasha played a set in Ibiza to promote the game



"Once upon a time gaming was a geek in his bedroom with a Commodore 64" indeed


Sony marketed the fuck out of the game on TV too

 
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I used to frequent Bowlers in Trafford, Manchester. They had WipEout and Tekken units in the chill out area. PlayStation did find a home in the rave culture.

SNES Mario Kart was a popular game to play at whoever's house we ended up at though. Good times.
 
I really liked Wipeout Pure, I think it was the retro style look to it.
 
OP in the UKs 1990's club scene:


in da club dancing GIF by Party Down South
 
I used to frequent Bowlers in Trafford, Manchester. They had WipEout and Tekken units in the chill out area. PlayStation did find a home in the rave culture.

SNES Mario Kart was a popular game to play at whoever's house we ended up at though. Good times.
Bowlers, Jesus Christ. Blast from the past that
 
Wipeout to me was more about the music than it was just the racing.

Picking Wipeout Omega collection seems like the easiest choice because it includes most of the other games anyway running much better.
 
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I remember this ad from back in the day and didn't get a drugs vibe at all from it. They were laid out from the g force, obviously! It even says so directly in the advert.
 
I can't think of a game that looked and sounded more cool at that time. It made edgy 90's attitude like sonic look like it was for little kids. Even stuff like tekken or twisted metal only looked "cool, for a video game" in comparison.
 
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I remember this ad from back in the day and didn't get a drugs vibe at all from it. They were laid out from the g force, obviously! It even says so directly in the advert.


As is so often the case with the British tabloid media, the headlines were predictably over the top, with The Sun, that long-standing bastion of family-friendly reporting (which, lest we forget, still had a naked woman on page 3 at this point in time), bleating that "an ad for a Sony computer game aimed at kids as young as three has been blasted as glamorising drugs." Just to make things even rosier for all concerned, the late Tory MP Terry Dicks branded the poster "a complete outrage."

Very much sums up the "games are for kids" attitude at the time.
 
For those (particularly in America) who don't know who the likes of the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers are






That Underworld track just fucked me up. I used to go to Tunnel in NYC as a teen (crazy to think now) and I remember hearing Born Slippy at like 8,000db, it rattled my bones and was amazing. I just smoked weed though.

I just listened to an Autechre album earlier actually.
 
Wipeout pure and pulse on psp. Wipeout HD was fun but way too hard for me after a while. The psp games looked great and we're a sweet spot for my tastes.
 
A fantastic book was recently released about the graphic design of Wipeout

 
I'm just going to quote myself from a previous post that I made months ago. Since I would just be repeating something that I already wrote down...

This video was the original CG pitch video that Psygnosis produced to sell Sony on the concept of Wipeout. I think this video was produced in 1994 or early 1995. It showed a very different concept of the game being more rally like. The final concept turned into a futuristic circuit racer. This footage was sold to Universal Pictures and it was used in the 1995 movie Hackers.



You can see the pre-rendered footage used in this scene here (spoilers):


The movie Hackers was released September 15th 1995, while the first Wipeout game released September 29th 1995; the same day as the EU launch of the PSX. The North American launch was September 9th 1995.

The Raw CG conceptual footage of WipEout that was produced by Psygnosis was sold to Universal Studios as 'stock footage'. Which ended up in Hackers.

Also, I saw this posted on the website 'Time Extension", these are some early 1995 Japanese PS1 ads used to sell Wipeout and Destruction Derby:
 
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Yeah this was a fun time. Basically Nintendo and Sega were ofcourse still around, but gamers grew up. If you were 16, and you attended clubs and events, all you would ever encounter was PSX stuff in the chill out and promotions. Playstation demopods were everywhere in scenes where Nintendo and Sega didn't exist. This was a very smart move on Sony's part. For this audience Nintendo and Sega weren't cool, Sony was the de facto choice for 16+ audiences and this is exactly what happened.
 
They were really big on Dance/House music and Rave culture back then.

Not sure whats big there now maybe Sharia Law
Night clubs in the UK are well and truly dead the last ones were wiped out due to the plandemic. Now it's all about dog water pop up events.

It's a real shame what has happened.

On-topic : NoClip made a video about Wipeout and it's music.

 
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For me Wipeout and GT are synonymous with the PS1. The music in Wipeout made me discover a type of sound that I didn't knew or was interested in at the time.
 
The best gaming days they were. The original hit me like a brick.

My school mates and me were already hooked on Prodigy, hearing them on Wipeout? Awsome.



I think the PS1 Demo disc with Wipeout 1 and Loaded on it was my most played thing back then.

Nothing hit in gaming like that, since or before.
 
Wipeout was a stable of our after club parties, load of us gathered round the tv, still buzzing from the club and drugs and trying to bate each others laptimes much to the utter bemusement of the ladies and non gamers
 
Putting a capital E in the middle of Wipeout is a crime against typography. Like people writing Lego in all caps, or putting a number 7 in the movie Seven.

The game is called Wipeout.
 
"Shedding" this image is/was kind of mindless imo... PS/Sony could consider revisiting it again. Nightclub culture is still well and alive, albeit with a different essence. It might earn them some points among the new subculture youth for keeping their fingers on the pulse and things.
 
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How did we get from the awesomeness that is Wipeout to a muscular goblina having cringy sex in The Last of Us 2?
 
Wipeout 2097 was a huge deal when it came out. I was a massive The Prodigy fan at the time (still is 🤘) and to hear them in a video game was mind-blowing. So fucking awesome. Sony did everything right with the first Playstation. The marketing they did was unheard of and the library of games kicked so much ass. Being a video game fan went from getting your ass kicked in school to suddenly being cool just because you had a PSX in the living room. Loved that console to death.
 
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