Hi Everyone, this is Karl Jones (Lead Designer) and Stuart Tilley (Game Director) of WipEout 2048 for PS Vita.

The new WipEout game is our biggest and most adventurous ever, with loads of awesome new stuff for you to get your hands on come February 22nd. But almost every game has at least one cool feature that sadly finds its way to the cutting room floor, and WipEout 2048 is no exception L. Earlier this year we prototyped a new (hidden) game mode called ZOMBIE.

Now, this is WipEout, so our zombies were never going to be the sluggish, lumbering, flesh-eaters you’re familiar with. These are 1000mph steel and carbon fibre machines of menacing evil, and they want you dead…

The rules of ZOMBIE were simple enough – survive the horror for as long as possible by avoiding or taking out the Zombie ships. You start in darkness, alone on the track. Then you hear them in the distance, the digital scream of their engines filling you with dread. They start to show up on your Zombie radar, a handful at first in hot pursuit and full of ominous darkness. Then they’re on you, ramming you, destroying themselves if need be, but they’re taking you with them. You can pick up Cannons and the occasional (but very rare) Quake to defend yourself, but it’s only going to delay the inevitable – you will die. As time goes by, more and more Zombie ships appear, becoming more and more aggressive, until you are surrounded by a swarm of carbon-clad deliverers of Armageddon, and that’s before a Zombie Mother-ship even shows up…shudder!

Our prototypes showed that it was a lot of fun to flee from a horde of terrifying Zombie ships, but ZOMBIE was just one of a number of cool modes in prototype. In the final reckoning, we made the call to put Zombie mode on the back burner. That said, like a real-life Zombie, ZOMBIE mode is dead, but it’s not completely dead. ;)

ZOMBIE mode won’t be in WipEout 2048, but we’ve still got loads of great game modes sprinkled in amongst our awesome Races. Head to Head, Speed Lap, Zone Mode, Time Trial and Combat events – every one of them with its own online leaderboard so you can fight for position against your friends and even the rest of the world.

That’s all from us for now. Don’t have nightmares.