^Click to fill eyes with much colourful imagery.

Here’s the last of the character concepts that I’ll be posting. I had intended to do more, but they turned out to be more time-consuming than I had anticipated. And since Studio Liverpool doesn’t know I’m doing these, and they’re not paying me for them, I figured it’s time to move on to some other projects that I’ve been meaning to do. Besides, after four of these I feel like I scratched the itch. (Well, mostly – I still want to do a Feisar and Icaras concept).

My intention with these was to do up a bit of a “love letter” to WipEout. I remember the first time I saw WipEout. It was back in the mid-nineties, when I was still in high school. One day at the music store I found the soundtrack for WipEout XL. This was a big CD for me – the music showed me that there was something to electronic music outside of the typical rave anthems at the time, and the graphic design made me feel sophisticated and unique.

I remember a friend looking at the cover of the CD and asking, “what language is that?” It was English, of course, but she couldn’t make out the letterforms of the “futuristic” typography. My ability to decipher the visual style, and to decode what was my first exposure to “L337 5P34K”, and my *clearly* advanced appreciation of this future-music gave me a sort of elitist “I am in tune with the future” feeling that I saw no evidence or desire for in my peer group. There’s a little line of text on the cover that says, “Music 04 Future People”, and I felt like I was one of those “Future People”. Looking back, it seems naive and silly – certainly it was more fancy graphic design than good graphic design, and techno is no more the music of the future than sushi is the food of the future. Nevertheless, whenever I see the swirling geometric forms, abstracted typefaces, and stylized infographics, I still get a little bit of that “Future People” feeling.

My goal with these drawings was to take that visual style I’d loved so much and see if I could produce something of my own with it. It was also a challenge to myself to see if I could produce something that achieves the visual part of that audio/visual stylistic unity that WipEout gets spot-on. (Which I guess would require me to deliver some audio while you’re looking at the drawings? Or something?)

I should also mention that while I had fun doing these character designs, I don’t think they actually belong in the game. With all the logos and slogans and branding everywhere, WipEout seems to push the idea of the corporation as the character, and I wouldn’t want the characters to interfere with that.

Ah well, it was a fun exercise that I will probably return to sometime down the road. I hope WipEout fans dig the designs – I’ve tried to avoid getting to “charactery” or wacky with them and tried to keep them relatively grounded and technical, hopefully in line with the series’ style and like any personality you might see driving for a modern F1 team. As usual, feel free to share your thoughts over on my LiveJournal page.

FUN FACT: Interpret as you will: despite all this WipEout-loving, I had never actually played any of the games until WipEout HD.

For a loose primer on the history of the WipEout series, here’s a quote from James Mielke’s 1up.com review of WipEout HD:

It’s been a long time since the Wipeout series’ 1995 debut, when it supplanted Nintendo’s F-Zero as the antigrav racer to beat. In the intervening years between its inaugural episode and the just-released Wipeout HD on PS3, the series continued to push the concept forward, from 1996’s seminal Wipeout XL (with its timeless soundtrack and finessed, more user-friendly gameplay) to 2002’s underrated Wipeout Fusion (the first in the series besides the N64’s Wipeout 64 to not be Sony-published — and the only PS2 entry) to 2005’s Wipeout Pulse on the PSP, which almost single-handedly reinvigorated interest in the long-running franchise. When Wipeout HD was first revealed, a lot of folks — for better or worse — assumed it’d just be an amalgamation of the two PSP entries, the aforementioned Pulse and Wipeout Pure, but with tweaked, high-definition graphics. After an extensive look under the hood of this magnificent beast, though, it’s apparent that the fruits of SCE Studio Liverpool’s labor equate to so much more.

WHD is a marvelous piece of software engineering, and you can tell that the dudes who made it enjoyed making it. It’s a very thoughtful, user-friendly game. For example, the custom soundtrack feature: it integrates seamlessly with the PS3’s playlist-creation features, and will optionally remember where a track picks up and leaves off between races. It doesn’t feel tacked-on as custom soundtracks usually do, and you get to tweak the game while retaining the game’s unified and polished design.

Also thoughtful: the ability to completely customize the degree to which motion-sensitive controls are used. Considering WipEout is a traditional PlayStation brand, there might have been the temptation for Sony to force the use of motion controls in order to promote that feature in their hardware. Even though the motion control is very well implemented, the developers have not forced it on us. THANK YOU.

Please enjoy this latest character concept, for the Piranha Advancements Racing Team. I have used the WipEout 3 Piranha logo rather than the newer one. Feel free to tell me how much this bothers you over on my Livejournal, where I’ve also posted a bit about the ship designs in the background (long story short: I neither want nor deserve credit for them).

^ Click once to add this to your cart, purchase, and have shipped to your cool friend.

This one is not my favorite, but I love all those little brightly-coloured ads and such on his racing jumper. Cool helmet, too. Tell me how much you hate this drawing, or how much you hate the arbitrary inter-capping in “WipEout” over at my Livejournal.

ˆ Click for a large, tasty version.

WipEout HD was released for the Playstation 3 today. For those not in the know, it’s the latest and most high-definitionish version of a game franchise that’s been running since the original Playstation. It is a racing simulation sent from the future, faithfully reproducing the F5000 Anti-Gravity Racing League experience. Think F1, except without the tires, the wheels, the maddening slowness, and with the addition of a gigatonne of explosives.

This seems like as good a time as any to share some WipEout character concept art I’ve completed. Don’t look for them in the game, cause they’re not there. There are about eight more of them, which I’ll be posting every now and then over the course of the next few weeks. I’ll also try to explain why everyone should care more about WipEout, and what anyone in any creative discipline can learn from it. Stay tuned!

FUN FACT: If the enlarged image isn’t big enough because your browser window is too small, you can shift-click, middle-mouse-button-click, or CTRL-click, CMD-click or do some other click to open the image in its own window/tab/pane/box/channel/page/shelf/cupboard/glovebox.

• WipEout HD Official Site
• Discuss this over on my LiveJournal (cause I’m too lazy to enable comments here)