I adore WipEout, but sometimes I think I'm most captivated by what isn't in it. Critics often observe that the franchise helped establish PlayStation as a brand by ingesting the sexier bits of 90s pop culture, seizing on them as furnishings for coruscating slipways of chevrons and weapons pads. It's a convincing line, but it also implies that WipEout's world and fiction are just edgy graffiti, a blaze of album cover iconography aimed at kids who were far too hip for the SNES and MegaDrive.
That's not how I saw it. As a teenager - very definitely not too hip for video games - I'd have paid no small amount of money for a game set beyond the track, in the cities that glint above every murderous chicane or plunging straight. Touring 2097's Gare D'Europa, I'd take potentially suicidal time-outs mid-drift to brood over billboards and the skybox. Who owns this blimp, cheekily posed at the top of the first ramp to remind you of an impending hard left? Where is that train going? And why does everybody in the future drink Red Bull? I'd tried the stuff and thought it tasted like deodorant. What did these trendy future-people know that I didn't?
Mind you, perhaps the point is not to know - both because anti-gravity racing demands your complete attention, and because a universe you actually experience can't help but fascinate less than one that's held out of reach. This also seems true of Psygnosis's other great science fiction opus, Colony Wars, a deft compromise between space flight sim and arcade dogfighter, released for PS1 in 1997. The two franchises couldn't be more different in most respects - WipEout's artistic debts are to glowsticks, trashy corporate motifs and bass you can feel through the soles of your feet, while Colony Wars is a big soppy love letter to George Lucas. But in hindsight, they both make dramatic play of the tension between what happens inside and outside the playable environment.
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