The developer of the browser version has asked Sony not to remove his project, citing copyright claims, unless they develop a proper remaster of the nowadays barely used IP…
Dominic Szablewski has taken notice of a leak and started working on the browser adaptation. The source code for wipEout was leaked in 2022, and he’s recompiled it, and you can play it here! Szablewski also wrote a long blog post about the development and didn’t hold back: he called the quality of the source code terrible and mainly included code for the ATI 3D Rage Edition version of wipEout. It was a PC (Windows) version bundled with some ATI graphics cards (AMD has since acquired ATI).
Szablewski believes that each port of the game (PlayStation PAL, PlayStation NTSC, PC DOS, Windows 95, ATI Rage Edition) was piled onto the previous one, so piecing together the original source code was no easy task for him. The first franchise installment was released by the UK’s Psygnosis for PlayStation in 1995. It was an instant success, so the release of the Wipeout Omega Collection (which included Wipeout HD, Wipeout HD Fury, and Wipeout 2048) for PlayStation 4 (later, PlayStation VR support was added) in 2017 was no surprise, but the series deserves more than that.
So the franchise, which was quickly making its way among antigravity racing games at the time, was already making its way onto PC, so maybe the Wipeout Omega Collection could be brought over. Still, with Sony not doing so well in sales lately (especially with Sackboy: The Big Adventure and the Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s ports), that’s probably never going to happen, so Szablewski has filled a gap that shouldn’t exist…
Szablewski has written that many old and new bugs need to be fixed, and he is working on implementing additional features, and if you would like to help him, you can visit the project’s Github page, copy his code, and build it yourself. Finally, he also left a message for Sony: if anyone from the company reads what he wrote, consider these two equally good options. Either leave his work alone or remove it, but then start a real remaster that he would be happy to work on.
Hopefully, Sony won’t follow Nintendo’s destructive example.
Source: VGC
Play the original wipEout in your browser: https://t.co/6WpTgi1ySq
Also check out the in-depth “Making-of” in my blog: https://t.co/9c7qmkoBrj pic.twitter.com/KAYMlbp4yE
— Dominic Szablewski (@phoboslab) August 10, 2023
Leave a Reply