Subvertising & corporate world-building in futuristic games
Wipeout didn’t just slap logos on the side of its racing ships. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains how The Designers Republic built the game’s F3600 Anti-Gravity League by asking who, what, where, when, and why about every element, then inventing a history and full brand guidelines for each team. He describes their noisy, layered, commercialized vision of the future as way more Tokyo than Copenhagen, and shares how the agency even recruited musicians from its album-cover work for the game’s soundtrack. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on Wipeout and The Designers Republic, The Best Brand World Ever Is a Video Game.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl walks through the book Wipeout Futurism to show what set Wipeout apart. The Designers Republic seemed to ask the five W’s about every element they designed, so the game became more than a racing game. It was the F3600 Anti-Gravity League, filled with sponsored vehicles just like real-world racing.
Each team, from FEISAR and Auricom to AG Systems, Qirex, and Piranha, got its own brand, history, and guidelines for how colors applied to its vehicles. That depth made the teams matter more than their stats. A viewer notes that The Designers Republic may have been the first to combine corporate identity practice with subversive cyberpunk design, and Calvin agrees that they refused to make the future clean.
He also credits the team for embracing the PlayStation’s low-poly limitations as a strength, and for reaching out to musicians they had designed album covers for, helping assemble a soundtrack at a time when video game soundtracks weren’t yet a thing.
Highlights
The Designers Republic asked the five W’s about every element.
Every team in the Anti-Gravity League got full brand guidelines.
The future they designed was noisy, layered, and commercialized.
Low-poly limitations became an angular, futuristic strength.
The agency recruited bands for the soundtrack on the developers’ behalf.
Key insights
Sub-brands make a world feel inhabited
Inventing distinct brands for each team gave players something to belong to. Calvin still identifies as team Piranha because of its name and cars.
The future doesn’t have to be clean
Rejecting the generic minimalist tech aesthetic made Wipeout feel inherently political, with story and lore embedded behind every invented company.
Constraints can define a style
Instead of fighting blocky PlayStation graphics, the designers doubled down on angular forms and turned a limitation into a signature.
Passion extends beyond the brief
Recruiting musicians for the soundtrack wasn’t part of a typical branding job, but it shaped the game’s entire atmosphere.
Detailed analysis
The clip shows world building as a branding discipline. Each invented company needed its own identity system, which multiplied the work but also multiplied the ways players could connect with the game.
Calvin ties this to cyberpunk’s history, from Neuromancer to Blade Runner, noting that Wipeout was one of the first official branded products to go almost fully cyberpunk in its aesthetic.
Conclusion
By asking deeper questions about every element and caring about details far beyond the brief, The Designers Republic made Wipeout’s teams, not its stats, the reason people fell in love with it.
Transcript
And so what they did with Wipeout, I think, is what actually set Wipeout apart from a lot of brands, and what we can learn from them and apply to brand building as a whole, was that The Designers Republic—whether they do this in their actual process or not—there’s like the idea of the five W’s, you know, we all know the five W’s: who, what, where, when, why, all these things. Every single thing that they design always feels like they ask that about every single element.
And then when you go into Wipeout, they obviously did that. So this is the book that I just showed you, Wipeout Futurism. This book’s also incredible. It has so many good details. They include tons of different examples of the logo while they’re working on it, just a ton of great elements. But this right here is what I love that they did. So they invent this world—the whole game—it’s not just Wipeout the game, it is the races of the F3600 Anti-Gravity League. And what is the Anti-Gravity League? The Anti-Gravity League is a racing league filled with all these sponsored and endorsed vehicles, just like we have in our real life. But so what do they do? They don’t just slap logos on the side. They invent whole worlds for each individual brand underneath the Anti-Gravity League.
So if this one is FEISAR, that you see on screen here—it’s not just about a car. Sure, there’s differences, each team car has different stats, but what you’re really looking at is, oh, the FEISAR cars are really fast, or their acceleration is really good, and they invent this whole world where there’s full brand guidelines for each company within this. So these poor guys—it was like, not only did they do the brand for just one game overall, but then they invented a ton of subbrands hidden within it for each little part of the world. And that level of specificity is what made all of this special. It’s unbelievable.
And then this is—let’s see if I can zoom in on this here a little. This is great. This is even their example of how, like, FEISAR is up in the top, Auricom is on the bottom left. All of these different—here’s how the vehicles look, here’s how the colors are applied to vehicles. They went so deep in this, and it really shows. So many good details.
Fuel in the Tank says it feels like they were the first to really combine corporate identity practice and subversive design, cyberpunk vibes, before that was a thing. Yeah, absolutely. It is funny to call out that it was cyberpunk in this time, because cyberpunk’s been around for a long time, back since Neuromancer, that novel—great novel, by the way, I just reread it recently. But we hadn’t really fully understood the aesthetic of it fully. Like there was Blade Runner and all those, but it hadn’t fully translated over to what happens when you just go almost full cyberpunk in a very official branded product like this.
So that was what I think they did really well—they always asked, with every single element they came up with, okay, we need to invent this brand for this team. It’s called FEISAR, or it’s called Auricom. Okay, and then what about them? Invent a history for them. Invent brand guidelines for them, all of these things. So they keep going deeper and deeper. And the thing that I think they nailed (and it’s that cyberpunk vibes aspect) is that The Designers Republic didn’t make the future clean. The future isn’t clean. It’s not this Apple or generic minimalist tech company aesthetic. They came up with this thing that’s noisy, layered, commercialized, and it’s inherently political because there’s so many inventions of story and lore behind every single one. And so it feels way more Tokyo than Copenhagen, you know? It’s packed to the brim with information.
And the thing about doing this too is that it really aligned with the limitations of the game. The Designers Republic and the game devs understood how to use the low-poly, low-pixel aesthetic of a PlayStation 1 game as a strength. That reinforces that angular futuristic style, which a lot of people fought against, where it was like, no, let’s try to do round shapes, but they end up just being blocky. No—they were just like, they doubled down on it and used that, I think, as a really big strength.
And so yeah, they invented all these sponsors and applied a corporation to each one, did that full rebrand, and I think the cool part is just that every single one felt different. You know, AG Systems is different from Qirex, which is different from Auricom, which is different from Piranha. And so, like I said earlier, it made it so the stats didn’t matter. The teams are actually what mattered. So I was like, oh yeah, in Wipeout 2097, I’m team Piranha—obviously, it’s a cool name, and I just liked their cars.
And I think another thing that just shows how much The Designers Republic cared about this—a way that shows their passion for it—was that, apparently (and this book again is incredible, there’s tons of writing in it all about the whole process, I could have bored you to death with so many details from it, but it’s so good)—they apparently were so passionate about this that they actually reached out to a bunch of musicians that they designed album covers for, on behalf of the game devs, to encourage them to be on the soundtrack. Because apparently not a lot of people totally got it. Like, why? This was such a new thing. The idea of video game soundtracks was not a thing yet. But The Designers Republic got it. And so they asked tons of people, and that’s how they got all these amazing bands on this soundtrack.