The future is now!
From Liverpool 1995, to Nevada 2035, to a PlayStation somewhere near you. Once upon a time, I helped to write the world of WipEout.
The 'WipEout' universe, in game form
On January 17th 2004, something happened that, in time, will change our world. It passed largely unnoticed, though an internet messageboard I know about grew a little excited.
It was the day that Pierre Belmondo was born. Deep in the Charente region of France (coincidentally - or not - this is a region in which I spent a happy family holiday in 1981), little Pierre was opening his eyes and gurgling at his mother, and feeling for the first time the pull of the earth, sucking him to the planet's surface. Inexorably, inevitably, gravity was - is - binding him to our spinning globe.
"...he toddles across the bare floorboards of his parents' large house..."At the time of writing, Pierre is just two years old. He toddles across the bare floorboards of his parents' large house, and when he hears the dogs barking in the yard, he goes to the window to see his father coming home. He is happy, I believe, though already inquisitive, unsatisfied with the few things he knows. He realises there is much to learn I think, and he is eager to experiment, to test, and to try things out. It exasperates his mother as he tips milk, scoops mud, scatters peas; he weighs, measures and considers all things.
But he is just a child, and is only partly self-aware. He probably does many of these things just for fun, not because his destiny is to one day challenge Newton.
There I go, you see. I'm using my curious sense of hindsight to read meaning into the actions of a boy who's two years old. I don't even know him - I've never met him. I've never had contact with his parents, and I couldn't tell you his precise address. If you want to find him, you have my best wishes, but no further help can be forthcoming.
The fact is that Pierre Belmondo may not exist. But some time in 1995 while sitting at an old Apple Mac in an office in Liverpool, I conjured him up in just a moment. I needed a name for a character in a fiction, and suddenly, there it was on the screen. Pierre Belmondo. I felt he should be French, so I stabbed at the letters of the most French name I knew: Pierre. Then I thought back to French lessons at school, and a text book we used that pretended to be a magazine for teenagers, with pages devoted to music, to fashion, to movies. One of these articles was a photo-story about a French film star of whom I'd never heard, who seemed notable mostly for the potato-esque nature of his nose: he was Jean-Paul Belmondo.
"...he became a man, an important man - the director of European anti-gravity research..."So, I had my name. Pierre Belmondo. And in that moment as I wrote, he became a man, an important man - the director of European anti-gravity research. He was a rebellious scientist, devoted to following instinctive urges even as they set him against governments, institutes and global conglomerates. He would become the single most vital figure in a new world of technology, of transport, and of competitive sport.
He would break gravity's bond, and in so doing, would invent anti-gravity racing.
Pierre Belmondo. A clever man indeed.
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The future was then, according to this 'WipEout 2097' shirt
In early 1995, I began work as a creative writer at Psygnosis in Liverpool. Psygnosis developed and published video games, and had achieved considerable success with a range of graphically adventurous titles for the Commodore Amiga. However, while the company created visual delights like 'Shadow Of The Beast', it was the addictive simplicity of a puzzle game called 'Lemmings' that had really found them fame and fortune. It was a game that reached far beyond the bedrooms of pubescent boys, and was enjoyed by grandmothers, sisters, mums and dads. And when I arrived in Liverpool on a dark and rainy Sunday in February 1995, 'Lemmings' was still the game that everyone knew. To be working for the company that gave it to the world felt... thrilling.
"...in one bizarre instance I was clonked on the head with an inflatable hammer..."In preparing for the interview that got me the job, I learned that Psygnosis had been acquired by Sony a couple of years before. The creators of the Walkman had already launched their first PlayStation console in Japan, and I realised that Psygnosis was already hard at work on games that would accompany the machine's European launch later in the year. After the interview was over, we jollied and we joked, and in one bizarre instance I was clonked on the head with an inflatable hammer when I professed support for Sheffield United. In a haze of good feeling and pre-Christmas giddiness - it was December 23rd after all - I was taken down a grey corridor in the dockside building and into a corner office screened by glass. And there on the desk was a small TV, and a PlayStation.
I was no computer games nut, but I knew enough to know that this modestly sized grey slab represented gaming nirvana in a world in which the next release, the next iteration of technology, is always the one you covet most. It isn't often you get to sample something that no one else can have, but for a few minutes as we played 'Ridge Racer' and felt the surge of excitement as its vivid landscapes flipped by, I realised I HAD to get that job. Like gaining entry to the Freemasons, it seemed I was on the verge of joining a sealed world, a parallel universe in which the technology of the future was already here. And somewhere within that universe, they were already playing 'WipEout'. Of which, more in a moment...
"...it was science from the future, and I'd seen it with my own eyes..."Christmas passed; colleagues in Sheffield asked if I'd got the job. I didn't know, though I felt the interview had gone well. I repeated the story of the inflatable hammer, and people laughed. It confirmed everything they suspected about the world of video games. I told them how I had been taken to the pub after the interview was over, and how the afternoon drinking had fuzzed the edges of the day, and how it had subsequently seemed to be only partly real, a blur. I didn't tell them about the PlayStation; that seemed too special, too secret. It was science from the future, and I'd seen it with my own eyes, but it didn't seem right to shout about it; perhaps it would have broken the day's strange spell.
I was glad I never gave away the secrets I'd seen, because the spell I was under never broke. I got the job, handed in my notice back in Sheffield, and moved to Liverpool. And once at Psygnosis, I was soon learning the language of games; of manuals and back-stories, of deadlines and delays. 'Slippage' occurred often. Games vanished from the schedule. Other titles seemed to exist in a permanent state of semi-completeness, an endless 'pre-Alpha' stage without any foreseeable conclusion.
"...exciting features promised, attempted, jettisoned..."Lines of code. Digital meanderings. Exciting features promised, attempted, jettisoned. Hopeless ambitions were curtailed by technology, but always there was the 'new version', the one with this bug fixed, that problem ignored, the other troublesome section removed. Nothing was final, it seemed. Nothing ever reached completion.
Yet through all this, the expectations of journalists and customers were tweaked and teased, until they came to believe in the promised state of ecstasy into which the forthcoming game would deliver them. And when Psygnosis went to the vast and cacophonous E3 trade show in Los Angeles, and exhibited a rather smart racing game called 'WipEout', this transcendental journey began in earnest once again. Only this time...
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You heard it here first. Edge magazine takes the lead
At this point, Pierre Belmondo returns to our story. You see, the writer's job was to create all kinds of written support for the games Psygnosis had on its schedule. I divided up the games with my fellow writer, and purely by pulling a screwed up piece of paper from a bag, I found myself with responsibility for 'WipEout'. Aside from the technicalities of writing the game manual and the bluff and bravado of the marketing support stuff, I was also required to fluff out some of the incidental history to the game - what in the film world is known as 'back-story'. So beyond the fact that 'WipEout' was an anti-gravity racing game - the player 'flew' race craft round a twisty, turny, roller-coaster-like track with an impressively stomach-lurching anti-grav feel - I was able to sit down at my Mac and imagine the circumstances in which this sport had come to be established.
"...there was an energy crisis, some conspiratorial industrialists, several hoodwinked governments..."'WipEout' was not the only back-story I was working on, but it was the only one that named dates, times and places that sounded as though they could be true. Fifty-odd years in the future, for sure, but kind of true sounding nevertheless. Fed by a few facts gifted by the game's development team, I put together a couple of pages for the game manual that told the story of anti-gravity racing in the form of clippings culled from contemporary news publications. There was an energy crisis, some conspiratorial industrialists, several hoodwinked governments, and a scientist as maverick as they come. Yep, that was Belmondo, but he was far from being the centre of the story. Just one more made-up name among many, his achievements were unlikely to be celebrated in any case, jammed as they were into the pages of a widely-unread game manual.
But 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.
'WipEout' though. 'WipEout' was different. True, few people checked out those couple of pages of story. But the look of 'WipEout', its speed, its fiendishly 'floaty' sensation - these all added substance to the style, which in itself was something very different for a game. Whether due to serendipity or carefully-calculated strategic marketing - and I know which of these I believe to be true - 'WipEout' tried a few new ways of doing things, and came to represent the 'new face' of gaming. As the PlayStation hit the shops and flew off the shelves, relegating Sega's rival Saturn console to land-filler in no time, the Sunday supplements and music press and style mags were all banging on about the new grown-up gamer. No longer kids in bedrooms, we were all meant to be clued-up club kids popping pills, sweating our nads off on the dancefloor, then coming home to chill with a PlayStation controller clamped in our mitts.
The 'WipEout' press ads. A bloody mess, but in a good way
As if to make this marketing dream come true, the Psygnosis people talked to the Cream people, and suddenly there were PlayStations in Liverpool's world famous superclub, which in the autumn of 1995, was still in its rapidly steepening ascendancy. Truthfully, if you wanted your machine to look hip in '95, that was the one place guaranteed to do it. And let's not forget that 'WipEout' was hard - damn hard in fact. And to the casual player - i.e. the one pilled off his nut in the dank corners of Cream - it could prove mind-alteringly difficult to control. But still they swerved round bends, still they careered into corners, still they slammed into the back of the ship in front, and somehow the E-frenzy coursed down their arms and into the console and back out into the crackling colours of the game itself.
"...'WipEout' became a blueprint for How To Look Cool In The Mid-Nineties..."Then there was the music, the soundtrack to the 'WipEout' dream. Orbital, Leftfield and the Chemical Brothers contributed to the mix, along with Psygnosis' in-house trance master Cold Storage. Combined with stylistic flourishes from Sheffield's Designers Republic design studio, 'WipEout' became a blueprint for How To Look Cool In The Mid-Nineties. It was as much accident as it was design, but at its heart there were people who really knew their stuff, and they'd been placed together in the same room, and they were passionate about what they were doing.
So it was a hit. A veritable hit.
And that meant that a year later, in 1996, there was 'WipEout 2097' - known as 'WipEout XL' in the States. Then came 'WipEout 64' - for the Nintendo 64. And then Wip3out. And much later, on the PlayStation 2, 'WipEout Fusion'.
So many games, so many back-stories.
"...I wrote pages on the pilots, the team sponsors, the sport's great moments..."Suddenly, it seemed, the world of Pierre Belmondo was an expanding universe. With talk of possible film scripts (which never happened), and the advancing capacity of the internet to house the ephemera that used to vanish into the easily-skipped corners of the manual, I wrote pages on the pilots, the team sponsors, the sport's great moments, the technology that made it all possible. I strung together a time-line that kept the key dates anchored to a secure(ish) place in history. I even had chance to name a few of the circuits (so I can here and now reveal that 'WipEout Fusion's' 'Katmoda 12' is a tribute to the Moroderesque throb of Jeff Mills's none-more-techno classic 'The Bells' - which appeared on the 'Kat Moda EP'; in a similar vein, the Florion Height circuit is a vowel-swapped homage to Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider).
Gradually, the characters and corporations I'd spun into the story came to live real lives in the depths of my mind. So while the game was always a game - you picked your craft, you raced round the track, you used weapons as you saw fit, and you won or you lost - the universe that supposedly surrounded it came to throb and pulsate and evolve as time went by. With a few words here and a sketched-in detail there, I alluded to years of science, conflict and human endeavour. It wasn't much, but it was enough - almost enough - to convince me it was real.
By the time of 'WipEout Fusion' - the PlayStation 2's much-anticipated though sadly unacclaimed sequel to the series - we were able to create a website that really seemed to have been beamed from this future world. I was allowed to roam wild and free, pretending that we were in the middle of the 2160 race season, adding the gossip and intrigue from behind the scenes, and including the bitching and back-biting that characterise all great sporting contests.
"...not that I'm playing God any more..."And the thing that seems to make the stuff I wrote for 'WipEout' rather different to the words I dreamed up for other games such as 'Colony Wars' or 'G-Police', is that people still care. Not loads of people. But some people. 'WipEout' still has a life after all - at the time of writing, 'WipEout Pure' on Sony's handheld PSP is still current - and that means the 'WipEout' universe continues to grow. Not that I'm playing God any more. Times change, careers move on, and I eventually left Psygnosis thanks to a touch of corporate shape-shifting. But it was good while it lasted, and with Pierre Belmondo now walking the earth - while yearning to break free from its gravitational grip - I think an interesting future is assured.
Because as Belmondo himself will one day say:
"A ball bounces. A pin drops. A man falls.
Gravity is the glue which binds us to our planet.
We are about to apply the solvent which will free our species forever."
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'WipEout 2097' press advertising. Slow minds will fear it
So where are the words? Why aren't they right here, right now, for the world to read?
Well... I don't own the words. I wrote them while a wage slave, and they belong to the people who paid my way. But if you want to, you can travel to a future in which gravity is combated as a matter of course by visiting various places across the internet. Alas, the huge 'WipEout Fusion' website is no longer available online, but many other articles are kindly hosted by the ever excellent WipEoutzone fan website. You can delve in by clicking the links that follow:
Profile of Pierre Belmondo, the pioneer of anti-gravity technology
Profile of Anastasia Cherovoski, original 'WipEout' pilot
Profile of Kel Solaar, original 'WipEout' pilot
Profiles of Arial and Arian Tetsuo, original 'WipEout' pilots
Profile of AG Systems, original anti-gravity racing team
Profile of FEISAR, original anti-gravity racing team
Profile of Auricom Research, original anti-gravity racing team
Profile of Qirex Industries, original anti-gravity racing team
'WipEout' and its sequels were created by the supremely talented teams at Psygnosis Liverpool, Psygnosis Leeds, and Sony's Studio Liverpool. A number of external graphic designers and musicians also helped make it into a landmark game. Whoever and wherever you are... aren't neon dreams so hard to beat?
Recommended website:
WipEoutzone - Where the spirit of the games lives on
© Damon Fairclough 2007