Have you ever chewed fog? Of the many pleasures that games have given us, I’m not sure that I can recall it. Even in the clammier moments of Silent Hill 2, when the mists bulge and bruise with all manner of malevolence, I couldn’t tell you what it tastes like. The question arises because of a booklet, that of WipEout, for the PlayStation, which briskly summarises the joys within: “Pick the team you want to race for. take control of your souped-up anti-gravity racer. then ride the six huge circuits leaving the rest to chew the fog.” Note the lack of capital letters at the launch of each sentence. In this world, there is never such thing as a stop.
The words belong to Damon Fairclough, who worked at Psygnosis, the legendary, now closed Liverpool-based development studio, in 1995. In a sense, his brief was simple: to write game manuals. Though, given that Fairclough was credited in the finished version of Wipeout 64 with providing “manual text and insanity,” we ought to assume that it soon warped from the simple into something else. When I asked him recently about his process, he described that time in cheery tones. “It was kind of like a joke,” he says. “There was always that sense of: not a lot of people read this, you could kind of go to town with it.” Fairclough was given details – ship sketches, track designs – and was tasked with giving them context. “You would get these crumbs from the developers,” he says. “You would just kind of spin a load of stuff around that.”
There was little sense, back then, that the spinning would lead a horde of devoted fans into dizzy reverence. “What I never really thought about was the impact this stuff had,” says Fairclough. “People who really got into the game then to read the story bit.” He’s right, but quite why this should be the case is tough to pin down. Fairclough is, among other things, a copywriter. (In a campaign of his for Toyota, advertising the company’s pledge for a full car service in sixty minutes, we see a man with a satchel clutched above his head in the rain, with the line “Just think what you’ll be missing” printed in the downpour.) Though Fairclough is unlikely to be asked to craft an undergirding mythology when he is, as he puts it, “writing about widgets for a bathroom catalogue,” his commercial instincts, along with his own obsessions, are essential to WipEout’s fiction.