Reverse Engineering WipEout

20 years after first poking about contents of the classic PlayStation racing game WipEout, developer Dominic Szablewski (@phoboslab) has brought the racer to life in your browser. All it took was the inquisitive mind of Szablewski, C code from a reverse engineering wiki, the assorted jumble of original WipEout game files and 800 lines of Javascript code.

The WipEout model viewer allows you to fly-through and free roam the 7 tracks from the original game, plus the ships, team and pilot logos. It even features the original soundtrack in all of its lovely Cold Storage goodness. It’s worth free roaming around all the tracks just to enjoy the work of the really talented developers at Psygnosis who created this iconic game.

Don’t try viewing it in Internet Explorer either, as it doesn’t work. Stick to Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari and you’ll be fine.

Szablewski has also written a lovely blog post explaining how he unpicked the game and rebuilt the tracks. You can grab the code for yourself from Git hub too. It’s a testament to his tenacity, curiosity and cleverness that he managed to solve the problem.

Another dev has already released WipEout model viewer VR that works with Google cardboard. At the moment it’s limited to the Altima VII track but still, it’s WipEout VR!