Wipeout's now remastered and playable in a browser, coder tells Sony to 'either let it be, or get a real remaster going'
Just over a month ago we reported on the sudden re-emergence of a shined-up PC version of 1995's Wipeout, a launch title for Sony's first PlayStation and a game that set the tone for the entire platform: cool, slick, and fast as hell. It came from an anonymous hero who, under the Github account Wipeout Phantom Edition, released an enhanced PC source port of the original Wipeout under that subtitle of Phantom Edition: «It uses game data from the PlayStation version and is much more comparable to the PlayStation version than the official PC port» (which I haven't played but is apparently not a great port).
This was based on a 2022 leak of the original game's source code from Forest of Illusion, and the Phantom Edition modder wasn't the only person with their eye on it. Where Phantom Edition required some work to be playable, one Dominic Szablewski has now used that source leak to rewrite the entire game (or as he puts it, «everything everywhere»), document the process, release it on Github and, for good measure, make it playable in a browser.
«Neither the Phantom Edition nor XProger's version [another Wipetout remaster project] come with the source code,» says Szablewski. «Understandably so. The legality of re-distributing the leaked source is questionable at best. So let's just pretend that the leak was intentional, a rewrite of the source falls under fair use and the whole thing is abandonware anyway.»
Szablewski adds that «I would have loved to work this into an officially sanctioned remaster, but as you can imagine getting a hold of anyone at Sony is impossible. So here we are.»
The coder goes into some detail on the actual contents of the leak, which seemed mostly to come from Wipeout ATI 3D Rage Edition, a
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