One Man Has Reverse-Engineered the Original WipEout to Work in Your Browser
What a time to be alive! Dominic Szablewski, a very talented programmer and indie developer, has reverse-engineered the original WipEout for the Playstation to run in a web browser. Essentially, Dominic has extracted the 3D models used in the original game and gotten them to display in a modern web browser through some clever javascript and WebGL. Nothing is actually playable, there’s no vehicles or physics, but it does show every track from the game, rendered in real time, with a camera racing through it. It’s also possible to stop the camera and control it manually, viewing the tracks from every angle (usually seeing things you originally weren’t supposed to see) and turn the original music on. He has also extracted the ship, team logo, and pilot logo data that can be viewed. Everything you see is original. They are the original, untouched models straight from an original disc, they aren’t recreated assets.
It may look a little dated, but seeing WipEout running on a modern screen – with modern resolutions and at modern speeds – looks absolutely fantastic and is a great nostalgia rush for anyone with fond memories of the original Playstation. Even better, this recreation runs perfectly well on phones and tablets; it ran as well on my iPad Air as it did on my PC. It’s a really cool feat of software engineering, and even though it’s not exactly a game, it’s cool enough that you should check it out.
The WipEout recreation can be viewed here, and you can view Dominic’s blog post that details the creation of it here.
