wipE'out - The Zero Gravity Soundtrack

Triple vinyl LP pressing. Back in the 1990s, video games were still largely seen as nerdy: fun, sure, but basically a guilty pleasure that you'd soon grow out of. The release in 1995 of wipE'out', a lightning-fast, razor-sharp, futuristic racing game that helped to launch the PlayStation in Europe and North America, changed all that. Key to this was the fact that wipE'out' borrowed unashamedly from the clubbing experience and electronic music, in a way that put it at the heart of progressive mid 90s culture. It soon became a phenomenon. wipE'out' also sounded like a new rave dream. The European version of the game included music from The Chemical Brothers, Leftfield and Orbital, the kind of fashionable game syncs that were almost unheard of at the time. Equally striking was the game's original music, which came from Welsh musician Tim Wright, aka Cold Storage, by this point already a veteran in the video games world, having worked on the music for Amiga titles such as Lemmings and Shadow of the Beast 2. His music for wipE'out' was, if anything, even more extreme than the big-name syncs, mixing the accelerated beats of drum & bass with the pure synth rush of trance to make music that sounded as breathlessly exciting as playing the game felt.