Have you ever chewed fog?
Of the many pleasures that games have given us, I’m not sure that I can recall it.
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 afullstop.
In a sense, his brief was simple: to write game manuals.
When I asked him recently about his process, he described that time in cheery tones.
“It was kind of like a joke,” he says.
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.”
“What I never really thought about was the impact this stuff had,” says Fairclough.
“People who really got into the game thenlovedto 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.
Consider the following: “It’s about cut-throat competition.
It’s about the technology, and the landscape, and the venues.
For Fairclough, the two are almost inextricable.
I was quite excited about that.”
What are these details, exactly?
Then, there are the teams.
We get a string of corporate mottos that trim each team with just enough geography and posture.
For Federal European Industrial Science and Research, better known as FEISAR: “The Muscles Behind Brussels.”
It’s almost a Pop Art sensibility.
The art of good game manuals is one of the saddest semi-casualties of the current era.
Hence the in-game booklet of Tunic, which you filled in and decoded as you played.
For Fairclough, being at Psygnosis at that time was a way to come unstuck, as it were.
Much of Fairclough’s work on WipEout is, in some ways, no longer around.
The booklets were produced in limited quantities, and his work on WipEout Fusion has pretty much vanished.
“Unfortunately, it was all done in Flash,” he says.
“It’s gone.”
Whether his work is bound in old booklets or gone in a flash, it leaves an unmistakable trace.
And if, like me, you regularly long for more WipEout, take heart.
Once there’s a history, it will have a tendency to occur again.
