Have you ever chewed fog? Of the many pleasures that games have given us, I'm not sure I can remember it. Even in the wettest moments of Silent Hill 2, when the mists swell and strike with all manner of malevolence, I couldn't tell you what it tastes like. The question arises from a brochure, that of WipEout, for PlayStation, which energetically summarizes the joys it contains: “Choose the team you want to compete for. Take control of your improved anti-gravity racer. Then, ride the six enormous circuits leaving the rest to chew through the fog”. Note the lack of capital letters at the beginning of each sentence. In this world, there is never such a thing as a full arrest.
The words belong to Damon Fairclough, who worked at Psygnosis, the now-closed, legendary Liverpool-based development studio, in 1995. In one sense, his brief was simple: write game manuals. However, since Fairclough was credited in the final version of Wipeout 64 with providing “manual text and madness”, we must assume that he soon moved on from simple to something more. When I asked him recently about his process, he described that moment in a light-hearted tone. “It was like a joke,” he says. “There was always that feeling that not many people read this, you can go to town on it.” Fairclough was given details (ship sketches, track layouts) and tasked with giving them context. “You would receive these crumbs from the developers,” he says. “You'd just go over a lot of things about it.”
It didn't make sense back then that the twist would bring a horde of devoted fans into a giddy bow. “What I never really thought about was the impact this had,” Fairclough says. “The people who really got into the game then beloved “He's right, but it's hard to say why that should be the case. Fairclough is, among other things, an advertising copywriter. (In a campaign of his for Toyota, announcing the company's commitment to sixty-minute car service, we see a man with a briefcase clutched over his head in the rain, with the phrase “Think of what you'll miss” printed in the downpour.) Although it is unlikely that Fairclough will be asked to elaborate an underlying mythology When, as he puts it, “writes about gadgets for a bathroom catalog,” his business instincts, along with his own obsessions, are essential to WipEout's fiction.
Consider this: “It is about fierce competition. It is about technology, landscape and places. It is also about history, because once there is a history, once the mystical transformation of the plane has occurred urban in a sound wave, It will tend to occur again.” There he writes not about WipEout, with its uninterrupted vectors of stone, steel and light, but about Sheffield, where he grew up, and the music of a certain place in time. However, show this passage to any WipEout lover and they will nod in recognition of the strange appeal of its story. Here's a sci-fi racer, focused on little more than breakneck speed, with no story or characters to absorb; and yet it remains in your memory: not just the pure, dizzying blow of a first place, but the feeling of being adrift, the ardor of a certain place in time.
For Fairclough, the two are almost inextricable. I asked him about his reflections on Sheffield, hosted on a blog called “Noise Heat Power”, and he explained that they were about aging and looking back. “That specific Sheffield that I grew up in, where this happened and this happened and these certainties that I took for granted existed, it really changed a lot,” he says. “The industry, the landscape, the certainties about what the city would be like in the future, when I was young I imagined that it was going to become more and more concrete and brutalist and, you know, that would just proliferate, and that's the world we would live in. “I was very excited about it.”
So how do you come to dream the story of WipEout when you've spent years looking ahead, chewing through the fog of an uncertain future? “I was never really a big science fiction fan,” says Fairclough, “so I don't always know where all the details come from.” What are these details exactly? We have the origins of the antigravity racing league, laid out, in that same pamphlet, as a collage of press clippings. An article in New Transport Monthly, February 2, 2038 (“Scientists who refused to bow to political pressure have emerged as key players in the development of the transportation system”); another in the “Biz News” section of Race Dayz, an American magazine, dated June 8, 2044 (“Rest assured: motorsports is DEAD”); and an introduction to the official F3600 Championship program from CEO Dirk Breakwater (“For the world watching this event, already bigger than the soccer World Cup or the Olympic Games”).
Then, there are the teams. Not just the glorious ships, which look like the upturned, painted, rocket-propelled contents of a cutlery drawer, but also the businesses that radiate at us from the margins. We receive a series of corporate mottos that adorn each team with sufficient geography and stance. For Federal European Industrial Science and Research, better known as FEISAR: “The muscles behind Brussels.” For the American team Auricom: “Push the limits”, as if all this were just another frontier to tame. And from G-Tech, the Japanese team presented at WipEout Fusion, comes the phlegmatic: “Products for an accelerated era.”
“I was filling it with inside jokes, private things that were funny to me…”
Let us observe, in that last line, that it is not the products that have caused the acceleration, but rather they have simply attended to it; It is age itself that has accelerated, fueled by a devouring hunger. Fairclough offers us glimpses into the world of WipEout, but they are glimpses from the inside: refracted through its media and sealed in the bright smog of its advertising. It's almost a pop art sensibility. Think Roy Lichtenstein, cutting strips of American life into lurid comic book form, hinting at weight and darkness but encased in an anti-gravity style. It's no surprise that The Designers Republic was drawn to WipEout, creating its box art and much of its in-game branding; that studio has always specialized in the process by which the ironic and the cynical are ignited and steam-cleaned until they shake.
The art of good game manuals is one of the saddest semi-casualties of the current era. I was touched when Rockstar Games stuck to tradition with the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 and included a drop-down map. It was a gesture, in keeping with that game's overriding theme, toward an antiquated way of life. More than that, however, he recognized the willingness of games to close their walls and make the real world come to life. Hence the Tunic game booklet, which you completed and decoded while playing. The pages took shape according to your understanding of the game's inscrutable land: a delightful nod to the manual's role, whose purpose is to illuminate the strangeness on screen. It seems almost inconceivable now that a writer could have such an impact on the texture of a game without actually being in he. If Fairclough's work on WipEout—most of it done on the margins, in the orbit of the event itself—has power, it's because, against all odds, it's personal.
“I was filling it with inside jokes, private things that I found funny,” he says, talking about his work on the WipEout Fusion website. As well as writing manuals for the series, Fairclough also wrote online articles and an entire fictional press pack, which he imagined would be handed out to journalists at one of the anti-gravity racing events. “In terms of looking back at the entire series, Fusion is by far the most surprising,” he says, “because it was the one where I was actually allowed to go to town – no one ever saw that press kit stuff, I think.” I had simply done more work than necessary, really just out of self-interest.” In fact, if there is a spirit that defines Fairclough's work at WipEout, it would not be self-interest but restriction: the freedom to express oneself within the limits of an order.
“I knew I wanted to write,” he says, “but knowing what to write about, for me, at that point in my life, was a big sticking point.” For Fairclough, being in Psygnosis at the time was a way to get unstuck, so to speak. You were given the opportunity to throw out the old adage of writing what you know and writing about what you know. No You know, gradually, of course, your experience would trickle down. “A job where you were given instructions like this was suddenly really liberating,” he says, “because it meant I could do this kind of work that I felt like I should do.” , and they gave me a theme, and a kind of loose framework, and I really feel like that helped me in a lot of ways in my writing in general.”
Much of Fairclough's work on WipEout, in some ways, no longer exists. The booklets were produced in limited quantities and his work on WipEout Fusion has virtually disappeared. “Unfortunately, everything was done in Flash,” he says. “He's gone.” What remains, however, is there not only in a hundred pages of the WipEout Wiki but, more importantly, every time you start one of the old games. You can catch it in the surreal mix of the corporate and the darkly comic, and if you go through a circuit or two and feel that these strange, remote sights not only point to a palpable future, but have an unattainable past, then Fairclough has done his job. He was a young writer, clinging to an already established trajectory, who strayed slightly beyond his brief and came up with something real. Whether your work is bound in old booklets or disappears in an instant, it leaves an unmistakable trace. And if, like me, you regularly crave more WipEout, don't be discouraged. Once there is a story, it will tend to happen again.