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
This was the beginning of mainstream/casual gaming. When non-gamers and even people who would previously mock games entered the hobby.

For better or worse. I'm somewhere in the middle. It was exciting back then but today i sometimes wish gaming was still a niche hobby for nerds.

Yeah that's pretty much what this advert was pushing, gaming is no longer just for children and nerds, it can be anything to anyone.

Gender, ethnicity, age, class, it doesn't matter (there's even a trans person and this is the 90s)

When people wonder why the PlayStation brand is so big worldwide, this is part of it




Now lets look at the competition and how they're off putting…



This basically says to most people "Japan gets games before you, and you're probably not good enough to play them"




As above, does a good job of demonstrating the product in action, but it's all about a bunch of white dudes being ultra competitive. Xbox players being "dudebros" meme started here.
 
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Sega Rally -- casual dads love it.


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This and Ridge Racer (original) were my go to's in the arcade, both had crazy drift physics, Ridge Racer more so obviously, but thats what made them fun. Ridge Racer was way more forgiving than Sega Rally, but Sega Rally had more a sense of achievement when you completed the whole rally. Wipeout needed an arcade release, that in a hydraulic cabinet would have been amazing.
 
Oim the fayastahta, ahm that instigayTAH!

I remember my brother would open the ps1 during play, and replace the game with the prodigy CD. It somehow worked.
I think you could even go into the pause menu and select different tracks through wipeout's own sound menu. I would love to try again but I don't have a ps1 anymore.

Anyway wipeout 2097 for life!
 
As well as the known artists such as Underworld, The Prodigy & Future Sound Of London, some tracks were original and composed by 'CoLD SToRAGE" aka Tim Wright (Also did Lemmings & Shadow Of The Beast series on the Amiga as well as others). His track, 'Body In Motion' was used on the demo for Wipeout 2097 and it's worth a listen alongside the other artists.
 
This and Ridge Racer (original) were my go to's in the arcade, both had crazy drift physics, Ridge Racer more so obviously, but thats what made them fun. Ridge Racer was way more forgiving than Sega Rally, but Sega Rally had more a sense of achievement when you completed the whole rally. Wipeout needed an arcade release, that in a hydraulic cabinet would have been amazing.
I sucked at arcade games generally plus not much spending money but I do remember a local electronics shop having a playable two player PlayStation on the floor and I along with a few others just treated it as a free arcade. It was great. Rage Racer, Gran Turismo and Crash Team Racing in the late nineties.
 
loved '95, especially taking the CD out of the 'puter and dropping it into my cool aiwa sound system, starting from track 2 all the gold of the world lying infront of me

Cold Storage was a good lad
 
Wasn't the game also available on the Sega Saturn?...

Yes, and it was frankly an awful awful port (as was 2097 and Destruction Derby)

- Lacking licenced music
- 20fps instead of 30fps
- Horrendous pop in
- Blocky low colour textures
- Mesh transparencies for shadows, shields and smoke

WipEout was such a technical tour de force in 1995 and the port made Saturn look like a potato.

Sega Rally was a bit of a miracle on Saturn because, for the most part, racing games ran like dogshit on Saturn.

 
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As someone who was all about House/dance music and the illegal warehouse parties going back to places like Blackburn et al in 88, then the big events like Amnesia, Helter Skelter, Fantazia etc. WipEout (it's a big E, y'know, E for ecstasy) pulled me right into gaming.

I saw the Prodigy on a tiny stage at the Eclipse in Coventry just before Charly got big. Keith looked like a scraggly haired jester dressed in a black and white jumpsuit hopping about. A bit too glowstick Ravey for me at the time and I couldn't be happier when their tiny PA ended and Carl Cox got back on the decks, but damn did they up their game a short while later. Love them now.

WipEout certainly did the trick for helping me fall in love with gaming.
 
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Which one was it that had Sasha's expander ? that game introduced me to Progressive house G'dammit, track is still a banger...

The UK sounds pretty boring

I mean, crooked teeth, bad weather and shittiest cuisine in the world aside, the dudes invented about (more than) half of the music genres in existence so for that alone, I'm willing to give them a pass 😉
 
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Which one was it that had Sasha's expander ? that game introduced me to Progressive house G'dammit, track is still a banger...



I mean, crooked teeth, bad weather and shittiest cuisine in the world aside, the dudes invented about (more than) half of the music genres in existence so for that alone, I'm willing to give them a pass 😉
YOOOOO what a track
Goteki 45 too, Sasha is a beast
 
2097 and wip3out were better games, but my fav has always been the original.

What a revolutionary masterpiece

Wipeout 3 is really impressive

We really got into this back in the day as it finally added split-screen multiplayer.

There's also a jump in resolution and pop-in is pretty much eliminated.
 
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