When Nintendo launched Super Mario Kart, it kicked off a trend of placing mascots in four-wheeled vehicles, which, you could argue, still exists today.
While Mario has always felt at home in a kart (and has now sold millions of copies doing just that), other kart-based efforts have fluctuated between “good” (Crash Team Racing, Sonic and All-Star Racing) to “pretty uninspired” (too many examples to mention, if we’re honest).
There’s a definite feeling that, despite Mario and Sonic’s success behind the wheel, when a mascot gets placed in a racing game, the company behind the move has run out of ideas.
It’s unusual, then, to learn that WipEout (which is a racing game already, lest we forget) was very nearly reimagined as a kart-based title with cute characters in it. The revelation comes from the pages of the superb WipEout Futurism book, and the mouth of Karl Jones, one of the key members of the WipEout design team since WipEout Fusion.
The origins of this unfulfilled spin-off come from WipEout Pure’s Omega Pack DLC pack, which was exclusive to Europe and saw a selection of artists creating unique circuits for the game, one of which – 123Klan by Scien – would send Jones down the rabbit hole.
The track featured a massive, cartoon-like monkey looming over part of the circuit – and Jone riffed on this aspect by scaling the primate down, sitting it in the cockpit of one of the game’s ships and seeing what it looked like doing a few laps.
“It looked so cool,” says Jones. “So on my local machine, I swapped all the ships for the monkey ones, lowered the speed class, disabled weapons, kicked off an Al race and watched it from the replay cameras. It looked awesome. Who wouldn’t wanna play Monkey WipEout Kart?”
Rather than being a fun experiment which ended there, Jones felt there might be some merit in this cute-and-cuddly spin on the famous anti-gravity racing series, and the concept was expanded to a formal pitch.
The monkeys were replaced with toy-like pilots instead, which players could level up and customise to their heart’s content. According to WipEout Futurism, the project received full branding treatment and concept work and was presented to Sony’s top brass.
It didn’t exactly go according to plan, as Jones recalls, SCE’s then-boss thought otherwise:
Phil Harrison said, and I quote: “Kart games are where franchises go to die.”
And that was the end of that.
Would you have liked to have played a WipEout karting game, as crazy as that concept sounds? Let us know with a comment below.
Go on.... treat yourself to a new game.
