Playing any racing game is an act of almost ruthless efficiency in decision-making. Failing to correctly lean into a turn or take a shortcut can often mean the difference between victory and loss. Any attempt to pay attention to phenomena on the periphery of the track only increases this risk of failure. This is no more pronounced than in the the nail-bitingly frantic Wipeout franchise which has portrayed no shortage of sidelined metropolitan futures. The Wipeout Omega Collection dapples a surplus of exquisitely-rendered portrayals of cyberpunk highrises and cutesy anime-inspired monuments to otaku culture along the margins of its curvaceous, sinusoidal tracks. While gorgeous, each of these tracks carries with it a theoretical if compromised vision for the future of cities sidelined by a keen sense of artificiality in the way they underminethemselves to give players the space to race.

A unified world we’re all spiraling down toward in perpetuity

We experience a race in Wipeout as we might a routine trip to a convenience store: hazily, a liminal blur which can feel like traveling a pathway through some half-real aether. Wipeout requires intense levels of concentration to play well, and can instill consternation in the player out of fear of vehicular destruction; thus it’s nigh impossible to scrutinize Wipeout’s aesthetics during the act of racing, even when experienced in closer proximity in its virtual reality headset mode. But the Wipeout Omega Collection seems to ask for at least a modicum of the player’s attention toward its dense outward cityscapes during its pre-race camera fly-bys. As in a promotional tourism package for a vacation spot, we’re shown montages of the Omega Collection’s myriad Hawaiian, Italian, and Japanese-inspired smart cities and the consumer entertainment deathtraps which they host. Pausing the game lets the player bring up a photo mode which allows one to photograph a race from a first or third-person perspective, freezing the action in the process and giving us a better glimpse at what’s beyond the immediate turns, item dispensaries, and boost pads which lay along a track.

This flora might just be plastic superglued on plaster

Many of these tracks are cordoned away in velodromes, much like the NASCAR and Formula One raceways of the modern era. But most others manage to seep out into metropolitan boulevards, giving us a broader view of Wipeout’s imagined cultures of the future. Upon closer inspection of these particular tracks, it’s plain to see that the cities of the Wipeout Omega Collection aren’t much more than elaborate Potemkin villages meant to placate the player’s sense of punk coolness, dampening the critical eye. Wipeout’s cities, as they stand, are uninhabitable and frankly absurd. Streets are twisted, lifted, and cantilevered over the edges of raised platforms. Invisible walls prevent drivers from exiting the track but are solid as the Brutalist concrete architecture of Le Corbusier, Goldfinger, and Rudolph, these often there in lieu of visible guard rails; neither of which can alleviate the impact. The vehicles which take part in Wipeout’s F9000 Anti-Gravity Racing League can be equipped with firearms and explosive artillery which racers are encouraged to use against one another to procure victory; one shudders to think of the casualties.

It’s appropriate then how artificial Wipeout’s portrayal of actual life inside these cityscapes appears. The onlookers placed there to cheer the racers on aren’t animated; they stand lifeless in their seats and on sidewalks built for no one like manikins cast in wax and dolled up for display in a shop. Moss and leaves run up walls to suggest a paradise world akin to the Garden of Eden, but it’s all so meticulously placed that one wonders if this flora might just be plastic superglued on plaster. Flying vehicles locomote in a straight line but it’s hard to tell if they’re truly headed anywhere. Fake pastiche brands devised by the intoxicatingly otherworldly Designers Republic appear on hovering signs and billboards, along the sides of buildings, and adorning vehicles and blimps. They advertise nothing in particular; it’s all window-dressing.

Wipeout Omega Collection’s artificial vision of future cities then is an idealistic palimpsest over anxieties surrounding the deleterious effects modern cities have upon our environment and first-world societies, to say nothing of the runoff effects of colonization upon indigenous spaces and other third-world nations. Untenable amounts of carbon emissions into the Earth’s ozone layer have led to a heating crisis and unclean air. Deaths from auto-accidents skyrocket to higher and higher rates every year. There exists then a vital need to redesign the cities of today to be more inhabitable by people, with more sidewalks, bike paths and dedicated bus lanes planned to facilitate safer travel and to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint. Such a city would also be designed with the inclusivity and safety of nearby peoples and land in mind.

There exists then a vital need to redesign the cities of today

Regarding their appearances, the peripheral spaces of the Wipeout Omega Collection’s post-modern absurdist future cities bring to mind the theoretical smart cities of the future such as the Songdo International Business District and Masdar City with a morsel of authenticity in terms of the keen digital artificiality shared between the two. In its low-poly Zone mode, wherein all textures are stripped down to flat, bright neon tones which routinely change based on player performance, we get a stronger sense of Wipeout’s brazen artificiality built on the back of consumer-focused A/B testing and prototyping which is reflected back in our own planned smart cities. In a conversation between Darren Anderson and P.D. Smith on cities of the future, Anderson noted, “I see many dangers in the unquestioned advance of Smart Cities (as there are with planned cities), one of which is the side effect of removing inefficiencies—when we very often live and thrive within these blind spots.” Here are the retrofuturist computer processor visualization abstractions of Tron, Neuromancer and Rez, with all serrations sanded and perforations filled; the veneer of inhabitable society slathered over these polygonal building blocks might be gorgeous, yet it’s all lipstick on a pig.

But Wipeout’s tracks don’t completely fit into humanity’s schematics for cities of the future, wherein corners are all sharp right angles, buildings all have an antiseptic dichrome finish and everything is safe, sanitized, and empty; a sea of London Shards. Wipeout instead merges the clinical faux-livability of planned smart cities with the wanton violence of places less economically well to-do; it’s of little surprise that there are no ghettos to race through in Wipeout. This is city-planning as consumer sport, prestige television you could reach out and touch from the safety of your backyard, without all that pesky cultural diversity and ethical responsibility. Here are unreal cities which don’t account for what happens when the race is over and everyone has to go home. Could these artificial places ever be a home?

Still, one can’t help but pessimistically see ideas pointing toward our own future cities in Wipeout’s vision of them, even as unrealistic as they may seem. As the amount of land left to plot upon on this planet shrinks, why not consolidate recreation inward toward our ostensible homes? Wipeout too nails the ubiquity of advertisements, manifesting corporate hegemony every corner you turn, making it difficult to ever comfortably be able to call anywhere your own building home. Like the invisible walls of its tracks, the hand of law is the only structure in place keeping one from torching a Wal-Mart billboard or a bus bench advertising a Ponzi scheme attorney. As the surveillance state expands in scope and logistical acuity, such transgressions will become more and more difficult to undertake. Wipeout’s airborne vehicles fly only in fixed directions, but so too are the routes we take every day commuting back and forth to school or work; automated cars will even further streamline travel time and summarily purge any and all spontaneity from the act of driving with efficiency and aplomb. Wipeout Omega Collection then accurately maps a unified world we’re all spiraling down toward in perpetuity, each taking the same turns at higher speeds than before but never able to break away for a moment’s rest.

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