It’s always fascinating seeing the plans for games before they were released, and reading through the game’s design document reveals the team had to make some changes from their initial vision.
Dated October 2, 1995, the document is 36 pages long and gives a pretty thorough outline of the developer’s vision for the original Wipeout. “The project is an attempt to surpass the likes of Daytona USA, Ridge Racer and Need for Speed, whilst retaining the gameplay features of Stunt Car Racer, Mario Karts and Formula One Grand Prix,” the genre paragraph reads.
What’s interesting is reading the changes that “suggested development deadlines” forced to the game. Psygnosis, or at least some staffers on the team, originally wanted “36 fairly short tracks” for the game, but that was revised down to “15 slightly longer tracks with the difficulty of each track increasing more dramatically than before”.
Those tracks were separated into three groups, with tracks following one of five themes. “The order of these themes should be Track 1 – Industrial, Track 2 – Aquatic, Track 3 – Desert, Track 4 – Vegetation, Track 5 – Martian,” the document says.
“Sticking to this order will help me to influence the styles, designs and complexity of the tracks whilst providing the player with the knowledge that the next track will definitely be in the theme of what he or she expects and hopefully dreads playing.”
An added note that I never noticed while playing was that if there was a draw between the player and an AI racer after 5 tracks of a championship, the game would pit the player and the other drawn racers into a head to head battle on a random track.
You can read the full document here. How would you have changed the design of the original Wiepout, if you had the chance? (And yes, before you comment, I know the top screenshot is from Wipeout XL. Sorry. It’s a resolution thing.)
Comments
7 responses to “The Original Wipeout Was Going To Have 36 Tracks”
Wipeout… you will be missed. One of my all time favourite titles. Hurry up, R8 games!
God bless Wipeout. The amazing design in it by The Designers Republic is what got me started in my career all these years later.
I wouldn’t have changed much. Maybe would have dialed back the view distance of the Saturn version (which was slightly greater than the PSX original), and pushed for a slightly faster framerate, but all in all, I loved the longer tracks. They keep you coming back, even 20 years later. Along with the music: https://youtu.be/4uQnXvRndcE
Man, I used to love the Wipeout series, but one thing that always irked me was how there was never really a large, Daytona style track with long, gradual banks where I could really open up the throttle. The series has some great tracks, don’t get me wrong, but there were a lot of tracks that would have been better if they weren’t spoiled with sudden sharp turns, hairpins or chicanes.
Yeah, even just one track like that would have been awesome. The rest could have had the turns, and twists and banks, but now that you mention it, a speed-style course would have been an awesome addition!
Designers Republic design is superlative. I really miss these games. Number 3 was just gorgeous with it’s muted tones and incredibly smooth gameplay. Felt like 60fps. Never played the psp or ps3 ones. I really want this series to continue and thought is was truly bizarre it dropped off the planet….
Sony’s disbanding of Studio Liverpool still hurts. WipEout series was truly something special, Formula Fusion from R8 should be a worthy take on the series.