Dominic Szablewski, @phoboslab
— Thursday, August 10th 2023

Rewriting wipEout

The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.

Thanks to WASM and WebGL you can play wipEout right in your browser!

I’m not the only one who embarked on a path to restore the game. To my knowledge, there are two other efforts ongoing: WipEout Phantom Edition and a yet unnamed project by XProger. Both offer more features than my rewrite. If you’re on Windows and you just want to enjoy the game, these are the better option.

However, neither the Phantom Edition nor XProger’s version come with the source code. Understandably so. The legality of re-distributing the leaked source is questionable at best.

So let’s just pretend that the leak was intentional, a rewrite of the source falls under fair use and the whole thing is abandonware anyway:

github.com/phoboslab/wipeout-rewrite

(Aside: I would have loved to work this into an officially sanctioned remaster, but as you can imagine getting a hold of anyone at Sony is impossible. So here we are.)