WipEout64

 Sony/Psygnosis | 1998 – 1999

In 1998 I was hired by Psygnosis Studios in Liverpool (UK) to work on a version of WipEout for the Nintendo 64; This was my big break in video games prior to which I’d only worked professionally within the industry at a small-time startup, ‘Crush Ltd’ and I still had no published game titles to boast of.  I have to thank Lee Carus, the then VP of art at Sony Psygnosis, for giving me the opportunity to work on this cult classic.

Here’s a great video overview of the title with some history of the IP.

 Sokana

Even though my previous 2 year stint in the industry had been spent mostly working on character animation, I was hired by Psygnosis to work on WipEout as an environment artist,  this was in part influenced by my strong Softimage background which was the primary 3D tool at Psygnosis at the time.

As one of a team of track artists assigned to the project, my task was to create something visually appealing based on a theme that had been assigned to the already created ribbon of track.

Each member of the track art team were given a track each, its associated theme, in my case ‘Volcanic’, and pretty much let loose to do whatever the hell we wanted.. which was brilliant and is something that would simply never happen these days.

At the time I was a huge fan of sci-fi and space exploration (and still am) and I decided to base my track on a volcanic, alien moon, that was now being mined by humans for its precious minerals, but also a moon that might be hiding a darker secret..

Due to the nature of the project, we were pretty much allowed to do what we wanted with the track environments, as long as it looked good and fit with the general theme we’d been given, I decided it would be fun to give Sokana a dark and mysterious backstory, this was for my own amusement but also to inspire a number of interesting visual features trackside that the observant viewer ‘might’ pick up on.

I’m a big fan of both O’ Bannon\Shusett\Scott\Giger’s  ‘Alien’  and Arthur C. Clark\Stanley Kubricks, ‘2001: A space Odyssey’, so I decided that it would be fun to add visuals that gave a nod to these classic stories/films, without making it too obvious 🙂

Sokana’s Secret

Sokana, is a hostile, volcanic alien moon with a few dark secrets.

Here’s an exert of the location description..

“The Race Commission demanded an anti-gravity circuit through active volcanic territory and I had to get them a location. Remember, they’re in competition with spectacular sports like Fire Ballet for Datacast bandwidth and they need serious background action. Sokana was ideal, plenty of space for those famous speed curves. Seismic activity in the region is a problem, though we’ve never suffered fatalities amongst race crew or paying spectators. We lost a hospitality suite full of international dignitaries when a lava flow burst its channel, but I think they were mostly about to fall victim to revolution in any case.” – Didier Maupassant, consultant volcanologist

What Didier never realised was that there were things FAR more dangerous to humans on Sokana than the volcanoes and lava…  We should never have landed there..

The Derelict

What appears to be the tail section of a derelict spacecraft precariously overhanging the track. Where did it come from and who was piloting it?

The Bio-mechanical tunnel

A tunnel whose walls appear to have grown, albeit they appear mechanical in nature.. The tunnel was already here and the track was merely built through it. A few pilots have been overheard muttering about walls that occasionally appear to move and squirm as if alive.

The Monument

A mysterious stone monument adorned with a strange glyph. Possibly an outpost marker to a gigantic distant pyramid structure of unknown origin that was found years after the track had been built.

The Monolith

A large black monolith that had been put here by?  A featureless, perfectly smooth, impenetrable solid block with dimensions, 1:4:9 precise to the highest tolerance measurements, was unearthed whilst the moon was being mined for it’s precious minerals.  The mining operation was subsequently moved away from this location after miners were subjected to a series of excruciating high pitch energy transmissions emanating from the otherwise inert artefact.

Here’s a video of Sokana