30 years of Wipeout: the futuristic racing game that caught rave music’s slipstream

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the PlayStation was a scrappy video game underdog entering a ferocious console war as a complete unknown. Its chances of success were far from assured. 

Sony’s nascent dream machine officially launched in the UK on 29 September 1995, arriving at a pivotal time for the established giants Sega and Nintendo. Both were preparing to take the leap into the 3D polygonal graphics powered generation – the anticipation of established in-house heavyweight titles like Mario, Zelda, Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter promising a no-holds barred battle for video game dominance. The PlayStation launched itself fearlessly into this fight with ports of Namco’s arcade hits Ridge Racer and Tekken, but one fresh futuristic racing title was a bold early statement of Sony’s intentions for their embryotic console: Wipeout.

Establishing a PlayStation identity was key for Sony. They didn’t have a library of beloved established titles under their belt, and so instead their console had to differentiate itself from its rivals through sheer attitude. The PlayStation was here to show that gaming could finally be cool. Wipeout was the perfect embodiment of this – a game representative of the cutting-edge underground subculture of the dance music scene of 1995, all wrapped up in an addictive anti-gravity racer that pushed the limits of 3D gaming tech. 

The print adverts for the game immediately became a sensation. The startling image of two young people – one of whom was a pre-fame Sara Cox - looking dishevelled, zoned out and with blood streaming from their noses was a million miles away from the family-friendly image cultivated by Nintendo. An inevitable moral panic about whether the ads promoted drug use followed, but as Ian Anderson from The Designers Republic recounts, “having the moral moronity kicking off about secret messages to pervert our children and society was the kind of gold dust that we could never have imagined.” 

Liverpool-based Psygnosis had already found success as the developer of Shadow of the Beast and publisher of the puzzle classic Lemmings by the time they began working on Wipeout. In 1993, they became wholly owned by Sony as a PlayStation first-party studio and began developing games for the new console – a risk for both parties. What they created was a cultural shift in gaming.

Set in 2052, Wipeout sees players taking part in high-octane, weapon-fuelled races across futuristic locales. The tracks have a rollercoaster quality: tight turns and stomach-dropping jumps showing off the horsepower of Sony’s new console. The 3D visuals here were a generational leap over the 16-bit Super Nintendo’s sprite scaling tricks, although surprisingly Nintendo’s Mario Kart still proved to be a huge inspiration on Wipeout’s development. In a 2024 interview with MixMag, Nick Burcombe, lead designer at Psygnosis, revealed that inspiration for the title manifested through a chance combination of the gameplay of Mario Kart with the audio of the rave classic, ‘The Age of Love’. 

The explosive potential of high-speed combat racing with high-energy dance music was immediately apparent. Combining breakneck gameplay with contemporary music and bleeding-edge design gave Wipeout a genuine cool factor that PlayStation’s rivals couldn’t hope to match. Critics raved, and the game became the best-selling launch title on the PlayStation in Europe. 

Wipeout’s timeless soundtrack took tracks from Orbital, Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers and fused them perfectly with in-house musician CoLD SToRAGE, forming a vital background beat that propelled not only the anti-grav vehicles of Wipeout but the PlayStation brand itself. Club-culture-inspired video game soundtracks had been seen before – the timeless techno beats of Yuzo Koshiro’s masterful Streets of Rage soundtracks pushed the Sega Mega Drive’s sound chip to its very limits, and Ridge Racer offered a very Japanese interpretation of the rave scene. Amateur DJs had been producing innovative dance tracks on the Commodore Amiga, one of Psygnosis’s main development platforms. But by harnessing the PlayStation’s CD audio tech and engaging with alternative electronic artists, Psygnosis were able to platform British dance culture to a global audience.

Wipeout’s cutting-edge sounds needed a cutting-edge visual identity to match, so Psygnosis turned to Sheffield’s The Designers Republic to package the entire game like a dance record. The acclaimed designers were known for their work with Warp Records, home of experimental electronic artist Aphex Twin. Their distinct graphic style had become a shorthand for the visual identity of underground electronic music. The work by The Designers Republic was all-encompassing – their designs on the game manual, box art, user interface, iconography and racing team logos all merge to provide a unified aesthetic. 

The game world feels like a future built by dance music: slick, flowing graphic design meets metallic colours in minimalist logos that could believably belong to a future racing corporation. The Designers Republic work merges seamlessly with the kinetic soundtrack to create a statement of intent for the PlayStation brand itself. This was a console that was determined to move video games out of teenage bedrooms and into the club. 

Sequels followed to further commercial success and critical acclaim, but none of them were able to capture the cultural zeitgeist quite like the first title. The game was even ported to the PlayStation’s rivals, with Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 versions of the game arriving in subsequent years. 

More recently, the celebrated soundtrack has been released on deluxe vinyl, and a hefty book of The Designers Republic’s timeless graphic design work on the game graces the coffee table of retired ravers around the country. Wipeout has endured for 30 years now in various forms, but the original game remains a perfect snapshot of a time in 1995 when British underground music and culture helped change the face of gaming forever.