Development and Release
Wipeout was developed and published by Psygnosis, designed in part by The Designers Republic. Aimed at a fashionable, club-going, music-buying audience, The Designers Republic created art for the game's packaging, in-game branding, and other promotional materials. Music tracks were licensed from non-mainstream electronica acts to create an original soundtrack album to promote the game.
The game's vehicle designs were based on Matrix Marauders, a 3D grid-based strategy game whose concept was developed by Psygnosis employee Jim Bowers. Nick Burcombe, the game's future designer, was inspired to create a racing game using the same types of vehicles from his experience with Powerdrome, F-Zero and Super Mario Kart. The name "Wipeout" was given to the game during a pub conversation, and was inspired by the eponymous song. Designing the game's tracks proved to be difficult due to the lack of draw distance possible on the system. However, the player received completely random weapons, resembling Mario Kart in their capability to stall rather than destroy opponents.
Wipeout was first released alongside the PlayStation in Europe in September 1995. It was the first non-Japanese game for the console. Two months later in November 1995, it was released in the U.S. The game went to number one in the all format charts, with over 1.5 million units of the franchise having been sold to date throughout Europe and North America.
Launch activities for the game included installation of PlayStation consoles running Wipeout in popular night clubs, the release of an accompanying soundtrack music CD, and the sale of a range of Wipeout clubwear.
The Saturn version of the game, released in 1996, lacked some of the visual flair due to its difficult-to-utilize multi-processor configuration. Particle effects were dropped in favor of simple sprites for weapon graphics; however, it ran slightly faster than its PlayStation counterpart.
In 1996, an OEM edition of Wipeout was bundled with new Sony Vaio PCs utilizing ATI's 3D Rage chipset. This 3D accelerated edition using the ATI3DCIF API provided additional resolutions of up to 640x480 pixels as well as bilinear filtering. This version also made use of the 3D Rage's MPEG acceleration.
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