In Hackers, the 1995 cult teen cyber thriller, a young Angelina Jolie and an American-accented Jonny Lee Miller play WipEout in a club. Established hacker Angelina is pretty good at the game, and has the top score. But then upstart hacker genius Jonny smashes it to bits. They hate each other. They love each other.
At the end of the movie Angelina and Jonny fall into a swimming pool and, finally, kiss, as Squeeze’s little-known love song Heaven Knows lifts the camera up into the air. A year later, in 1996, the pair married. By then, WipEout, the racer that evolved from that pre-rendered demo Angelina and Jonny pretended to play on the big screen, was the most exciting video game in the world.
Improbably, a dozen or so people from a north west England developer called Psygnosis had conspired to stomp on Mario’s head and speed past silly Sonic onto the cover of style magazines. WipEout steered into the slipstream of a dance music-fuelled drug culture, leaving its racer rivals in its wake. Forget beeps and boops – WipEout on PlayStation had heavy beats. WipEout was for grown ups. WipEout was cool.
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On Wednesday, 22nd August 2012, 17 years after the release of the first WipEout game, Sony closed Studio Liverpool, née Psygnosis. The news sent shock waves rippling throughout the game industry, saddening hundreds of game developers and thousands of gamers. Sony had closed the door on one of the most influential – and long lasting – studios of all time.