Editor's Choice

Formula Futurist

The Xbox meanwhile opened up the throttle on its own Wipeout, with the visually wondrous Quantum Redshift. Clearly, to compete with PlayStation legend, the Xbox had to prove it could hit all the same high notes, and a futuristic racer was crucial to such a display of gaming eminence. While my own weakness for the genre means I enjoyed Quantum Redshift more than its overall lackluster critical reception might have suggested, I still knew it was a flawed and doomed project. It tried to be everything that Wipeout had been, and simply could not recreate the moment. Whatever you thought of Quantum Redshift's lavish imitations, its water-beaded camera and hyperbolic, spandex-carved pilots, the facts of its critical and commercial slump are undeniable: The follow-up game was cancelled by Microsoft, and the development team, Curly Monsters, disappeared into the silent ether of redundancy and dissolution.

Perhaps the fate of Quantum Redshift explains the fate of the genre as a whole. It tried to live entirely within the shadow of its predecessor. Wipeout was so iconic, so vital, as to dictate what it meant to be a futuristic racer. The future racer genre suffers from the same problems as the MMOG genre: There is one game that all others are forced to ape if they want to make a pass at success. Just as EverQuest and then World of Warcraft have defined how the majority of MMOGs have been implemented over the last decade, so few futuristic racers have been able to escape the gravity of the Wipeout series.

The future racer, then, has been both best exemplified and worst shackled by Wipeout. Its initial success seems to have engendered a chronic lack of experimentation within future racing games. Of course, there were some exceptions to the rule, but their scarcity only drives the point further home.

F-Zero GX, Quantum Redshift's contemporary on the GameCube, took its inspiration from quite a different source and was the last great future racing game. It managed to sidestep Wipeout's impact by having its own wide, ultra-fast tracks, weird environments and fantastical backdrops. Impossible angles and unlikely courses that raced off at right-angles to the plane of gravity kept things flying, but still it was dogged by its pack of appeal, its lack of newness.

Then there was the 1999 experimental racer, Rollcage. Although not well received by critics , the game showed some definite flair for moving outside the Wipeout template. The cars were attached to the course, but were also able to play with physics - driving along walls and ceilings with absurd aplomb. It was a game that hooked dozens of the people who bought it, but made little impact on the genre as a whole. No games went on to imitate the title beyond its sequel, Rollcage Stage 2.

Also without any progeny was 2001's left-field, ultra-high-speed Ballistics, from the Swedish team GRIN (who went on to create the recent Ghost Recon games). Ballistics did speed and little else and soon vanished into obscurity. Two thousand kph down steel tubes, sound barriers breaking, outrunning the noise of your own engines. Flawed, yes, but it was a game that did something new, did something that belonged to that single game. It moved outside the Wipeout template and, inevitably, was lost.