Everything in XL was dripping with style, from the track designs to the heads-up display.

Tomorrow's Style, Today

The unmistakable visual style of Wipeout XL wasn't just a bizarre fluke. Psygnosis actually brought in The Designers Republic, a small but influential UK design agency, to help construct the overlying visual language that the Wipeout games would become known for. The Wipeout logo and the packaging, as well as the various team, weapon, and pilot logos (essentially everything that defined the Wipeout visual style), were created by The Designers Republic. Interestingly, TDR has not had any work within the video game industry outside of the Wipeout games. Most of their work can be found on album covers for bands like Supergrass and Pop Will Eat Itself, as well as in ad campaigns for the Sony Aibo and Swatch watches. For the complete TDR experience, check out the official site.

Lots of games thought they were cool--WipeOut XL knew it.

Though times have changed drastically over the past half-dozen years, there was a time not too long ago when you could make statements like "Video games? Those are for kids!" with complete impudence. The beginning of the end for such narrow-mindedness toward electronic entertainment was arguably ushered in by the launch of the Sony PlayStation. Nintendo and Sega were content with continuing to solely make video games for their established hardcore clientele. Sony knew that if it tried to play that game, it would lose. So Sony did what Sony does best--it went for the mass market, nurturing the development of games that would cross over and resonate with an older audience that had either grown out of video games or had never had experience with them to begin with. Games like Resident Evil, Twisted Metal, and Final Fantasy VII were all instrumental in the widening of the console gaming audience, as was Psygnosis' futuristic racing series, Wipeout. The first Wipeout gave a glimpse of things to come, but it was the sequel, Wipeout XL, that elevated the formula to a whole new level and brought the whole video game industry with it.

At its absolute core essence, Wipeout XL was largely identical to Nintendo's F-Zero racing games. You raced skin-rendingly fast crafts, of abstractly futuristic construction, through abstractly futuristic environments. The difference, though, was in the details. Wipeout XL featured slick-looking hoverboats that were exotic enough in design to fit into a far-flung futuristic setting but were textured in such a way that they appeared hewn together from real materials. This, coupled with the diverse yet consistently gritty and realistic course settings, gave Wipeout XL a much more secure grounding in reality than the F-Zero games ever had.

But the gameplay isn't what really cements Wipeout XL in the annals of video game history: It's the game's production values and attitude. Many games had attempted to be cool, with their extreme sports themes and rock guitars, but Wipeout XL was the first game to actually co-opt some of the edgier youth culture and make it work. Wipeout XL's attitude was born of the European dance culture of the mid-1990s, and this was reflected in its menus and overall visual style, both of which had an abstract, art student design--like an electronic dance music album cover brought to life. Other small dance culture-inspired touches, like the trackside advertisements for Red Bull--a product that wouldn't hit the US until years later--made the game hipper than you ever realized at the time.

Then there was the music. The soundtrack for Wipeout XL featured licensed music, almost exclusively, and was the first game to prominently do so. These weren't just throwaway tracks, but, rather, they were some of the highest-profile electronic music acts of the time--at a time when electronic music was just on the cusp of gaining serious widespread popularity in the US. Astralwerks, which remains one of the most prominent dance music labels around, provided tracks from The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Underworld, Orbital, Leftfield, and The Future Sound of London, among others. This was a soundtrack that worked amazingly within the context of the game but could just as easily be taken anywhere. Much of it still stands up to repeat listenings today.

Though it can't solely be credited for the maturation of the video game medium, it certainly did its fair share to help things along, and it's that sort of risky, groundbreaking design that makes Wipeout XL one of the greatest games of all time.

In 1997, I had been out of the console gaming loop for a few years, as the PC had taken the console's place, primarily for fiscal reasons. But the highly produced, teen-focused games that Sony was squeezing out on the PlayStation brought me back, and Wipeout XL was the first PlayStation game I really became obsessed with. The visual style gave the future a cooler, more postmodern look than it had ever had. The soundtrack to the game became the soundtrack to my life. It was the first time that I realized video games didn't have to be a dorky pastime and that they could be legitimately cool.