The best brand world ever is a video game
The brand for the 1995 Playstation video game Wipeout is legendary. It created a deep, futuristic, sci-fi world through corporate aesthetics, cultural remixing, and subvertising. I think it's the best example of using graphic design and identity to create a whole new world and culture. Let's talk about what we can learn. You’re Not The Audience is a weekly live show where I break down brands, products, and subcultures that truly stand out by not trying to appeal to everyone. Creative Director Calvin digs into brands that zig while others zag, highlights what works, what doesn’t, and pulls out real strategy insights you can use to be distinct from everyone else.
Outline
Calvin opens the show the way he always does, framing Parliament as a brand transformation agency that helps brands facing big changes become the next version of themselves, then quickly admits this week’s topic is a personal obsession. After a little news from the Parliament world—founder Chris Erickson’s birthday, the studio’s gloriously bad annual golf tournament, and a new rabbit mascot in need of a name—he gets into the real subject: why the 1995 racing game Wipeout is, to him, the best example of using graphic design and identity to invent a whole world.
The argument rests on The Designers Republic, the Sheffield studio that built Wipeout’s look. Known first for Warp Records album covers and an anti-establishment streak, the studio mashed brutalist, constructivist, and Swiss design together with poppy Japanese product design to create what we now recognize as the late-’90s and early-2000s aesthetic. Calvin walks through how, when game studio Psygnosis needed a hit, it took the unusual swing of hiring a branding-and-album-cover agency rather than a conventional corporate design shop—and how that decision shaped everything.
What made Wipeout special, Calvin argues, is depth. The game isn’t just a racing game; it’s the F3600 Anti-Gravity Racing League, and every team in it—AG Systems, Auricom, Qirex, FEISAR, Piranha—got its own invented company, history, and full brand guidelines. The stats stopped mattering; people picked teams because of the world around them. The Designers Republic kept asking why each sponsor existed and kept going deeper, and they refused to make the future clean. Instead they made it noisy, layered, commercialized, and political—more Tokyo than Copenhagen—and they used the PlayStation’s low-poly limitations as a strength rather than a problem.
Calvin ties it to subvertising: parodying and remixing real corporate and political imagery (a twisted Pepsi logo, the American flag) to create emergent meaning, then letting real sponsors like Red Bull sit beside the fake ones until fantasy starts resembling our own capitalist reality. The takeaway he keeps returning to is specificity. Wipeout wasn’t a hit because it was designed for everyone; it was deeply specific, built for hardcore fans who got the aesthetic—and that’s exactly why so many people saw themselves in it. The episode closes with where Calvin sees this going next: a likely return of brand mascots as companies look to rehumanize in the age of AI, and a reminder to invent the mascot’s whole world rather than dropping a generic illustration on a website.
Highlights
The best brand world ever built, Calvin argues, is a 1995 PlayStation racing game—Wipeout—because no other product of its era went so deep into a fully branded world.
The Designers Republic, the Sheffield studio behind Warp Records covers and the Wipeout look, fused brutalist, constructivist, and Swiss design with Japanese pop minimalism to define a whole era’s aesthetic.
Game studio Psygnosis took a real risk hiring a branding-and-album-cover agency instead of a conventional corporate design shop—and that’s what made the world feel alive.
Every team in Wipeout’s F3600 Anti-Gravity Racing League—AG Systems, Auricom, Qirex, FEISAR, Piranha—got its own invented company, backstory, and full brand guidelines, so the teams mattered more than the stats.
Subvertising—remixing and parodying real corporate and political imagery—let the game borrow equity we already understand and twist it into commentary and emergent meaning.
The future The Designers Republic built was intentionally not clean: noisy, layered, and commercialized, using the PlayStation’s low-poly limits as a strength.
The real lesson is specificity: Wipeout succeeded by being deeply specific, not by appealing to everyone—the more specific the world, the more people see themselves in it.
Key insights
Build a world, not a moment
Calvin’s central reminder, handed to him by the chat and immediately adopted, is that too many brands chase a split second of attention and lose themselves doing it. The beautiful work happens when you go deep instead—developing a world with enough detail that people can live inside it, rather than engineering one loud moment designed to be scrolled past.
Ask why like an annoying child
The technique behind Wipeout’s depth is simple and relentless: keep asking why. Why does this sponsor exist? Why does this team exist? The Designers Republic answered each question by inventing more—a history, a logo, a full set of brand guidelines—and the world got richer with every layer. Don’t be afraid to be the kid who asks why over and over; it’s how you create story, depth, and art.
Subvertising creates meaning by remixing what we already know
Subvertising—a portmanteau of subversive advertising—means building parodic, cynical, or fake versions of real corporate and political brands. Because audiences already have an established relationship with a Pepsi logo or a national flag, twisting those references generates instant meaning and a little political commentary. It’s the engine of the whole Wipeout aesthetic: keep reinterpreting, keep remixing.
Specificity is what lets people belong
Wipeout was a surprise smash not because it was made for everyone but because it was made for almost no one—deeply specific, built for fans who understood the aesthetic and the narrative. Calvin returns to the old line that if you design for everyone you design for no one, and flips it: the more specific and absurdly detailed a world gets, the more people unexpectedly see themselves inside it.
The future shouldn’t be clean
The Designers Republic rejected the Apple-style, minimalist, frictionless vision of the future. Their future is noisy, layered, commercialized, and political—closer to Tokyo than Copenhagen, packed to the brim with information. That refusal to sanitize is what made the invented world feel believable and lived-in.
Tension is a viable brand option
Most brands instinctively remove tension; Calvin argues that makes tension worth reaching for. Slamming two disparate worlds together—high-speed racing and the UK rave scene—produces a collision of originality and a genuinely distinct perspective. The same goes for creative input: don’t only look at more design; go read a book, watch a movie, live a little, and bring that back into the work.
Constraints can be a strength
Rather than fighting the PlayStation’s low-poly, low-pixel hardware, The Designers Republic and the game’s developers leaned into its angular, blocky look and made it part of the identity. Calvin connects this to the current resurgence of deliberately low-resolution game design—uglier games that cost less and take less time—and to brands that should stop being afraid to look interesting or even ugly.
Detailed analysis
The throughline of the episode is that branding can carry narrative entirely on its own. Wipeout has no characters and no story in the conventional sense, yet its world feels alive because every detail is doing world-building work—what Calvin calls emergent narrative. You don’t read the universe in cutscenes; you absorb it through team liveries, invented sponsors, fake corporate histories, and a soundtrack pulled straight from the UK rave and techno scene. The Designers Republic understood that a believable world is assembled from specificity, not exposition, and that the more obsessively you answer small questions, the more real the whole thing becomes.
That obsession is also a method other brands can borrow. The studio’s habit of designing a whole suite of supporting material around any single idea—logos in progress, color applications, vehicle systems, brand guidelines for companies that exist only as decals—is exactly the discipline Calvin wants brand builders to steal. It’s the difference between a logo and a world. He points to McDonald’s older mascot universe as a corporate example of the same instinct, and laments that so many brands abandon that depth in favor of generic minimalism.
There’s a cultural argument running underneath, too. We’re in a revival of the 2000s aesthetic and a renewed appetite for appropriation—borrowing visual equity from other corporations and art and recombining it into something new. Calvin sees subvertising as the most interesting version of that move because it carries built-in commentary and a little cynicism, the same way The Designers Republic mixed real and fake sponsorship until the line blurred. He’s candid that this particular expressive, maximalist style isn’t his own—his background is grid-driven Swiss design—which is part of why he admires it and why he argues some work needs a specific kind of designer to lead it.
Finally, Calvin connects all of this to where brand-building is heading. As AI pushes companies to rehumanize, he expects mascots to return—and he wants brands to treat them the way The Designers Republic treated a throwaway racing team: invent the backstory, the name, the whole world, rather than dropping a cute illustration onto a tech website. The lesson of a thirty-year-old racing game is, in the end, a working method: go one level deeper than feels reasonable, and let the specificity do the rest.
Conclusion
Wipeout endures because The Designers Republic treated a racing game as a complete universe and refused to stop short. They asked why at every turn, invented brands within brands, remixed real-world equity into something subversive, and embraced the medium’s limits instead of hiding them. The result is a world specific enough that players found themselves inside it—proof that depth, not breadth, is what makes a brand world stick.
For anyone building brands today, the takeaway is portable and a little uncomfortable: stop optimizing for the loud moment and start building the world. Ask the annoying questions, lean into tension, get absurdly specific, and don’t be afraid to look interesting. The more particular and detailed the world you make, the more people will recognize themselves in it—and that, more than any single logo, is where the real work lives.
Transcript
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to You’re Not the Audience. This is a weekly live show where I break down brands, products, and subcultures that stand out by not appealing to everyone. And oh, we’ve got a good one for that today. I’m Calvin, Creative Director at Parliament. And for those who don’t know, Parliament is a brand transformation agency. That’s what we call ourselves. We help brands that are facing big changes, and we help them become the next version of themselves with strategy, positioning, identity, messaging, all that good stuff. But this stream is just talking about brand overall, and we’re going to have a fun one today. This is a unique, specific interest of mine today.
So, oh sweet, we already got Lone Archivist in the chat here. Let’s go. Vector design discussion. Oh yeah, we’re going to talk a lot about Vector Heart today. That’s one of the names for the style that we’re going to be talking about today.
So, structure of the episode: normal week, we’ll start with just a little tiny bit of news and obsessions from the Parliament world, and then we’ll do a deep dive into our subject today. End with some Q&A, random chat at the end. And feel free to toss anything in chat along the way. How’s everybody doing today? Everyone doing good? Any fun things going on in your lives right now? It’s officially summer here in Portland, so it’s been hard to focus and not just want to be outside all day.
All right, let’s get into it. So quick little intro before we do some—oh, going to a cider festival later today. And thanks, yeah, glad you’re looking forward to the stream. Going to a cider fest. You know, I’m a cider fan. On the side of Parliament, I do a lot of work for a cider company just outside of Portland called Son of Man Cider. So I’ve got a little bit of a cider nerd side to myself as well. And they’re good. Everyone try Son of Man. It’s a Basque-style cider. It’s funky and weird. Give it a shot.
Okay, so today we’re going to talk about Wipeout, maybe the best branded video game ever. But before we get into that, I’m going to just talk about a couple little things from the Parliament world. I mean, I guess the important one: yesterday was Chris, our founder, Chris Erickson—it was his birthday. So if you know Chris Erickson, hunt him down on the internet, tell him happy birthday. I believe he’s 29 years old again. Isn’t that the joke? I think he went to Hale Pele, our local tiki spot, last night, which—if you know Chris, you know he has a deep love for exotica and the Polynesian pop world.
Other fun things—I think I talked about this some last week or two. We do our annual golf tournament that we’re all very bad at. We’re all terrible golfers. We just do it for fun. Let me actually—I can show you some fun stuff here. So last year—nope, that’s not what I want. You don’t need email. Oh, that’s what we’re going to talk about. Here we go. So last year we just took this classic old imagery of a rabbit and used it as the mark for our annual golf tournament called the Caddyshack tournament, and it was just a fun thing. This is pulled from CSA Images, which if you don’t know, CSA is the best collection of archival stock classic ad art and everything. It’s great. So look up CSA Images.
And we asked our friend Brett Parsons, who has done some work for us on some secret projects that aren’t announced yet—we asked him to reimagine the rabbit. So in the span of a few days, he sends us these incredible sketches. We asked him to do a full body and a head illustration. We picked our favorites and he immediately sent back some tightened-up sketches. So now we’ve got this rabbit that’s a little mischievous. And we’re going to then take this, put it on a bunch of swag so we have goofy-looking stuff for our golf tournament. And I just love Brett’s work. He nails that good expressive line style, good expressive faces, very fun and goofy. And so the important thing that we’re missing now for this character is, if anybody has name ideas for what we should call this little mascot, let me know, because I don’t know, something Scottish bunny related, rabbit related, I don’t know. So if anybody’s got any ideas for what we should call this little bunny, throw them in chat. If we pick yours, I’ll hunt you down and send you some swag, some nerdy golf swag.
So okay, let’s get into it today. Oh, and I think some of the best names—we’ve seen a bunch, like Bogey Bunny. That was a good name for him. Oh yeah, feeling like Putts, or Putts? Oh, Putts is good. Maybe Putts Bunny. Maybe it needs to be like MC Putts—that’s his last name, MC Putts, for, you know, the Scottish vibe.
All right, let’s talk about why I think Wipeout is the best brand world ever. Little bit of a clickbait title today, but you know, it’s the internet, what can you do? Okay, so step back. Today I want to talk about the 1995 PlayStation video game—it was on a lot of other things, I think it was even on the Sega Saturn—a game called Wipeout. It’s a racing game. At the time it was like the fastest, most intense racing game to ever exist. It was 1995, PlayStation 1, with its low-poly, low-pixel aesthetic. Looks awesome. And Wipeout was really special because it created this insanely deep futuristic sci-fi world through the use of corporate aesthetics, a lot of cultural remixing and appropriating, and a lot of subvertising—which I’ll talk about subvertising later and what that is.
And just at the time, there was nothing like it. There was nothing that went as deep into its branded world. No other game went as deep into that world as they did. And it kind of then became the standard for how to do branded worlds in video games. And I just think it was really unique.
And why that’s important is, you know, last week—this is kind of an extension of last week’s episode where we talked a lot about how to move beyond basic brand building. It’s kind of helpful to look beyond just the walls of your organization or your brand and really look deep into a subculture, find history, find lore, and find ways to infuse the stories and grit of that subculture and its spirit into the core of your brand. So that’s a really good way to remix and adopt some kind of history that might not actually exist in the brand that you’re doing—it’s like, see how you merge it with something else.
And so yeah, like I said, the title is a little bit clickbaity. Best brand ever, or best brand world ever, maybe. I don’t know. For me, it was really important because I was 10 years old in 1995 and I just remember nothing else looking like it. And this game and the design agency behind it were kind of like the vanguard and thought leaders behind this look, this ’90s techno UK rave look that is now having another moment in the light right now. It’s definitely come back. And the thing that I think they did really well, which was unique for the time, was it wasn’t just a brand, it wasn’t just a game. It felt like it completely invented an alternate history—well, I guess an alternate future—and the way it remixed culture.
Yeah, I’ll—chat, I’ll heal the Republic. Yep, we’ll talk about The Designers Republic in just a second. The Designers Republic was the agency behind the look, and they’re incredible. They’re still around. They’ve been around for like 40 years. And I think what’s really unique to keep in mind during this is the level of specificity they went into in every detail throughout the brand for just this racing game. That’s what actually made us fall in love with it. So it might just be a futuristic version of our current capitalist hellscape, but they went into so much detail we’re able to find ourselves and belong in it.
So all right, what is Wipeout? Let me switch over here. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is Wipeout. This is the cover for the PlayStation game just called Wipeout. This is the sequel, Wipeout 2097. Fun story about the title for 2097: in the US it was actually called Wipeout XL, because the game publishing company was afraid that Americans would be too stupid to understand that 2097 was the sequel, and so they called it XL instead. Good. Good job, America.
So Wipeout was a racing game, this futuristic high-speed racing game. And here, I’ll just play this. This gives you a complete idea of the aesthetic. Every single aspect of it was branded. The race type, the teams, their factions—everything had this level of branding added into it. But the thing that was really unique about it was—what did I say? TBH. He wasn’t wrong. No, he wasn’t wrong. So the big thing that was really unique about this game specifically was how much it took from the UK rave scene and techno scene, and they actually—all those bands actually showed up on the soundtrack for this game. The soundtrack was like the defining atmosphere and direction for everything.
See, this is—you’re seeing video now of what the game actually looked like. I think this is actually Wipeout XL, or 2097. This came out in 1996, 1997, and so it looks a little bit nicer than the first one. So you know, you’ve got bands in here like the Chemical Brothers, the Prodigy, Orbital, Leftfield—all these really essential bands that then blew up. And this game was kind of what brought a lot of that music to the masses for a lot of people. And it uses this aesthetic that just fuses a lot of visual noise with negative space in a really nice way.
Already Lone Archivist said in the chat that this style is often referred to as Vector Heart, or it’s also called Metal Heart, but to me it’s just the Designers Republic style. And I’ll show you some Designers Republic work in just a minute more.
So why do I think this is some of the best brand work ever? I mean, in the game space, this was really—Wipeout was the first video game to use commercial design and branding as a narrative tool and a storytelling technique. No one had really done this before. Branding and identity work in video games was just for the cover and the title screen that you press start on, basically. Everything else was just—then you’re in the game and that branding world has been left behind. But then another reason why I think it’s one of the best is that music aspect—they really leaned into the soundtrack, and it was designed from the ground up to embody the music of the UK rave and techno scene. And I think it really did for rave and techno music what Tony Hawk did for punk for a lot of people. That was a lot of people’s first introduction to punk music, which is wild, but I love it. Everyone remembers that soundtrack.
And the company that created Wipeout, Psygnosis—I think they took a really huge swing by bringing in this company called The Designers Republic to do the branding for it. That was even a unique thing on its own, to bring in that type of branding company.
So let’s talk through some of the history of Wipeout, because I think that’s also why I think this brand is so good and unique, because nobody was doing what they did at this time, this kind of branding. So, history. Wipeout, in the early ’90s—there’s a company called Psygnosis. They’re the game development company. They have this idea for a game, and Psygnosis was in a rough spot after they had a failed game called Puggsy. I don’t know if anybody remembers Puggsy, but it turns out it didn’t do great for them. And so Sony swooped in and bought Psygnosis. And so Psygnosis really needed a hit. So they did this big swing on creating this racing game.
Their lead game designer apparently was really obsessed with Mario Kart—which, I mean, who isn’t? Mario Kart’s some of the best racing games ever. But he was also super into the UK rave and techno scene. So he had this idea of, I want a really fast racing game that embodies that spirit of fast-paced music that you get when you’re at the club. And mashing those two worlds together was what created the game. And so he went to this agency called The Designers Republic, who is known for creating mostly branding and album covers. That’s what they were actually known for.
I think I’ve got some more stuff for them here. So this is actually an amazing post that I found. Someone just went through and collected some of their favorite work by The Designers Republic. And so I’ll show you some of this. They’ve designed tons of album covers that you definitely know. And so they went to this agency—they’re known for creating album covers, crazy branding work—and they of course received a ton of pushback from Sony because they were so unorthodox compared to going to just some other corporate design brand who just cranks out a logo and that’s it. But The Designers Republic really wanted every aspect of the game to be infused with this aesthetic and this rave attitude.
So if anybody in chat has a favorite Designers Republic thing, toss it in chat and maybe we can hunt it down. But okay, let’s talk Designers Republic. The Designers Republic, one of the coolest agencies to ever exist. They still exist. It’s a small crew. They’re a UK design agency. I forget exactly where they are—Sheffield. Somebody check me on that. So a UK design agency, and they first gained prominence doing album covers for Warp Records. So anyone who doesn’t know, Warp Records was the most influential electronica record company of that era. Like everyone was on them, like Aphex Twin, just tons of so many good folks.
And so they were notoriously anti-establishment, anti-authority. They were a group of—I think the main core was four people—and rather than just nailing down some clean corporate design niche, they were heavily influenced by that techno and punk scene in the UK. They pulled in a ton of brutalist and constructivist design aspects, Swiss design, and then they mashed it all together with this poppy Japanese product design and joy and minimalism, and they just created this thing that now to us feels like, oh yeah, that’s what the ’90s and 2000s looked like. And it really started with these guys. And they just nailed this perfect style of maximalism with minimalism, noise combined with whitespace. And somehow they’re just incredible.
So yeah, to me they were the peak of ’90s and early 2000s design, and we all know that’s having a big resurgence right now. I think another thing that they did, which was kind of revolutionary for the time—and it was happening in the contemporary art world and other design worlds, but it really coalesced into something special for them—was that I think they were at the forefront of remixing and appropriating the design and art of others.
I mean, here, actually, here’s a great example. I’ve got it sitting open right here. I love this. One of the brands that they created for Wipeout, which I’ll talk about more in a second—in Wipeout, every single car had its own company that owned it. And this is from the book about Wipeout stuff where they created this brand. Oh, let’s look at Auricom. And then they just created tons of elements, like stealing the American flag and using that. They stole the Pepsi logo and reinterpreted that.
Oh yeah, Jared—TDR and Autechre. Yeah, those are great. Oh man. Let’s see if I can find that. I’m going to do some very quick and dirty Googling, because—oh boy, it’s being a mess right now. All right, we’ll save that for later when we get digging into things.
So they were just really at the forefront of this very postmodern idea of mixing, remixing culture, appropriating elements, and I think that was a really interesting way for them to add some political commentary and a little bit of cynicism into everything that they do. So, I’m going to jump back to here again really fast. This is—I’ll just give you a quick look. I like this guy’s collection of stuff because I think it really captures some of the different styles that they had, whether it’s super clean minimalism. This is probably one of their most famous, the Aphex Twin single for Windowlicker. I mean, if you’re into electronica, you have seen this cover a thousand times. Aphex Twin is the defining artist of this era, it feels like. And so they just did tons of really interesting, beautiful, tech-forward minimalist work, and they designed the Warp Records logo, which is also a classic in its own right.
So to give you another idea of how some of their work looks—there was, for anyone who doesn’t know, there used to be a magazine called Emigre, and it was kind of the center of the ’90s grunge era of design, this maximalist design style. And they let The Designers Republic do a whole magazine. So every aspect of this magazine was designed up by The Designers Republic. And it just has this—oh yeah, that’s—I haven’t heard that in a long time. Yeah. And it’s just absolutely packed to the brim with details, small little design elements that allude to imagined companies, imagined mascots. You can see some of their work in here. I mean, I was always a Nine Inch Nails kid, so the Nine Inch Nails “Sin” logo over here is a classic. They even made LFO look good, which I didn’t know was possible. Sorry, LFO fans.
And so they have this way of really structuring space where it feels like it’s filled with noise but somehow comes out of this history of Swiss and minimalist design. And I love it. Everything they design feels packed with some kind of meaning that’s maybe just outside of your understanding. Like here they’re doing some appropriating—there’s the Atari logo hidden in this one, that huge one, and then they’ve just turned it into their own thing. And I love this page in here because it gives a really good example of when they design one thing, they actually design a whole suite of stuff to go along with it. And that’s kind of how they invent these worlds.
So that’s what I think makes The Designers Republic really special. 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.
Someone says, fuel in the tank: 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 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.
So all right, who are some favorite techno bands? Techno bands—it sounds weird. Techno artists from that era, for anybody. I mean, I was always a Prodigy kid, just because it had the right aggression. I always loved Prodigy, and I was a big Orbital fan. And I think those both show up on the original soundtrack. I should have tossed a link in below for the soundtracks. Go hunt down the soundtracks, they’re great.
So yeah, let me know. Fave—oh, Underworld guy. Yeah, totally. I loved Underworld. Underworld was great. It was so funny. I mean, I grew up—when I was getting into it, late ’90s, early 2000s, when I was getting into the techno scene—I lived in rural Washington state. And so it was the most foreign, crazy thing that I was into, this world of electronica. And then it got me—I was always into industrial, and so all those things kind of melded. But it felt like I was on another planet listening to this music, where I was living—it was everyone listening to classic rock and country music, and I was into metal, industrial, and electronica.
Oh, LTJ. Yeah, I don’t know if LTJ showed up on anything for the Wipeout soundtracks. Oh yeah, the Hackers movie is right there in the trenches with this game’s design ethos. Lots of the same arsenal of soundtracks. Absolutely. We just went and saw Hackers, my wife and I, in the theater. I was going to say it was probably two years ago, but it was so good. It’s still just an absolute classic. Crash, crash and burn.
Okay, so I’ve talked about it a bunch, this aspect of Wipeout—inventing all of these different brands and how that created this whole world. Yes—hack the planet, hell yeah. Okay, so I think the most unique part about their brand building—we talked about world building a lot last week, and how a lot of corporations invent—my favorite example is always McDonald’s, because I just love their brand building. I love that they invented this whole imaginary world of mascots that they don’t use as much anymore, which is so foolish of them. But I think they were kind of masters of it. And what The Designers Republic did with Wipeout was do that, but through the lens of corporate sponsorship and corporate branding.
So the term that this has come to be called is the idea of subvertising. Subvertising is when you create parodies or spoofs, or just fake cynical versions of corporate and political sponsors or brands, and it’s usually used as a criticism or some attempt to disrupt and upend the meaning of that corporation. It’s done in a lot of protest work. And that whole idea of subvertising is really the root of everything that The Designers Republic does, and the whole Wipeout aesthetic is just like, keep going deeper, keep reinterpreting, keep remixing.
And this was a wild idea for design in the ’90s. This was still at maybe the height of postmodernism, when everything was really starting to mix and form, maybe turning into something else. I don’t know what post-post-postmodernism we’re in anymore, but they went into it with such specificity that the invented world became real just because it’s packed with all this imaginary advertising.
And one of the things that I love about that was—oh, it probably got shown in here somewhere. There’s still a lot of racing going on in here. You want to just keep watching some Wipeout racing while we’re talking? This is great. God, even just the UI of this looks so crazy. So they had this whole invented world. And the reason why—oh, actually, here’s one of my favorite examples of this. In Wipeout 2097, the sequel—the first Wipeout did insanely well, way better than I expected—and then they got real brands on it. So you see right here, “improve reaction time, Red Bull.” So then you get this amazing mix of real sponsorship slammed next to fake sponsorships, and it’s the one time where I feel like real company endorsements and sponsorships is great. So you get all of this mix of reality with fantasy, and it really helps us envision ourselves in this world, because it starts resembling this hyperrealist version of the capitalist hellscape we already live in.
So that’s how the sci-fi fantasy world became believable—just keep going deeper, keep adding details, and they just built the whole universe with this method. And I don’t know, we’re still enamored with it now because of its specificity. There’s so many great streams of stuff in here. This is just a YouTube video of all the intro videos from each one, and just a truly beautiful thing. Also, when you think about the fact that they were making this in, you know, ’95, ’96, and that—I can’t even imagine how much of a nightmare it would have been to make any of this work.
N2O: Nitrous Oxide, sort of a cousin to this game. Absolute banger soundtrack and graphics. Oh yeah, absolutely. There was kind of an era of racing games where they kind of got it after this. Let me know what your favorite racing games were of this era. I mean, there was, you know, the big ones, like Gran Turismo, Forza—those racing games are awesome. Or there was a lot of rally racing games. Those games are cool, but they were just hyperrealist, like actual realism. And those just kind of never clicked for me.
There’s certain levels that were so visually chaotic they were hard to play on a crappy TV. Oh yeah, playing this on my 13-inch CRT in my bedroom as a kid was not great. I used to think they looked so cool. Oh yeah, when Archivist grew up on Rush 2049—yeah, awesome. I mean, I was a huge Ridge Racer fan. Ridge Racer also had some of this aesthetic, not quite as extreme, but Ridge Racer also had this very unique, a little bit more Japanese anime-influenced aesthetic to it, and I thought it was great. I still hear the way they say “Ridge Racer” in my head all the time. Oh man, sorry, I’m just going to be distracted just watching all this. I love the whole look of this thing.
Great. So okay, what did we get to pull from all this stuff? I think—you even get The Designers Republic logo in here. Great. So, oh, obscure one on Saturn was High Velocity. I barely remember that one. Okay, let’s look up High Velocity really fast. I forgot about that. Oh, it looked good. Here, let me share my screen with it. A little more realistic, but just a great—I love that there’s been a huge resurgence of low-poly, low-resolution texture game design that’s been happening lately. It’s probably going to wear out its welcome real soon, but when it’s done well, it looks incredible. It’s probably really friendly to game devs. What’s the famous tweet or quote—somebody drop a link to it in the chat if I remember—that’s the, like, “I want uglier games that cost less money and take less time,” whatever that tweet is. I think that’s why that low-poly work is really coming back again.
Okay, so what did we learn from all this stuff? It was really fun to go back through this, because I loved Wipeout, and my friend bought me this book for my birthday recently. So it was just a really fun dive to go back into that world and remember what made it special, and it was integrated with my old love for electronica and things like that.
But I think—oh yeah, Jared said, “Build a world, not a moment.” Good. Okay, if you’re putting that in chat, we’re done, call it for the day. Build a world, not a moment. Nailed it. I think that’s it. I mean, that is such a big one—that especially in our world of branding now, it’s so just screaming for tiny little whispers of your attention, that I think a lot of brands are losing themselves when they’re trying to just scream for that split second of attention rather than developing their own brand. And it just breaks my heart to see that, because I think that’s where the real beautiful work happens, is when you just go deep.
So that’s definitely something we can pull from this—just go a level deeper. Anytime you’re approached with anything, just ask why. Don’t be afraid, when you’re doing brand-building work, don’t be afraid to be the annoying child who asks why over and over and over again. It’ll help you create more depth, more story, and just more art to put into that world. That’s why the Wipeout world is so good, because The Designers Republic kept asking why. Why does this sponsorship exist? Why does this team exist? Go deeper. Create a brand. Create full brand guidelines for them.
And I think the other thing too is that most brands kind of choose one lane. And—oh yeah, there was no story or characters in Wipeout, but the whole world felt alive solely through branding and details. Yeah, that was—it’s all emergent narrative. I didn’t really talk about it today, but that was the big thing out of world building that we talked about last time, that don’t just fill it with story and expository language. Wipeout is told only through its branding and through the design aesthetic in it. It’s all emergent narrative. You discover it. You get the vibes of it after playing it. And it is just so smart and actually nuanced in a way—despite its noisy aesthetic, it has some nuance that no other games were doing at that time.
Yeah, I was going to say, most brands kind of also just tend to choose one lane. And I’m guilty of doing this. It’s really simple to guide a brand towards, you go in this one direction, you do this one thing, keep doing that, you should be successful. But I think something special happens when you can mash a couple worlds that are really disparate together. You get this racing combined with this UK rave scene, and it creates this collision of originality and just a really distinct perspective.
It’s the same thing where—you know, you want to get inspired as a designer, or you want to get inspired as an artist, don’t look at more art. Go take a break. Go discover something else. Go read a book, go watch a movie, go experience life and bring that knowledge back and mash it into your work, and it will become better, and you’ll have a distinct perspective that isn’t just defined by what everyone else is doing in that world.
And I think we’re definitely back in this moment right now, given the explosion of 2000s design aesthetic, of just thinking about how we can appropriate imagery, steal equity from other corporations and from other art, and use that as a way to create emergent meaning within a brand. They did that with—like I mentioned earlier, the Pepsi logo shows up in things in Wipeout, the US flag shows up in some of those design elements. They’re all things that we have a natural understanding and established history with. So then try twisting it, and it becomes almost like political commentary.
I think too, of the same thing with most brands choosing one lane—most brands tend to avoid or remove tension. But what that means to me is that tension is then a viable option. You can put two things together and make them butt heads, and that can actually create brand meaning right there. And so, I mean, that gets back to the whole idea of this whole live show I like doing, which is that Wipeout was a huge surprise, massive success. And Wipeout wasn’t a massive success because it was designed for everyone. It was deeply, deeply specific. It was designed for creating hardcore fans who got the aesthetic, who understood the narrative.
And I think this is kind of what every good brand world does, or should do, because the more specificity, the more your fans can see themselves inside that world. And the more specific you get, the more you create a world that people actually want to belong in, the more you can create a world that people can see themselves in. And so I think that’s the real art here of all of this. This is the classic, like, design for everyone, design for no one. And it’s always a really nice reminder. And it’s fun when you get to pull it back from a 1995 racing game—that the more specific you get, it feels absurd at times, but someone sees that, and somehow people start seeing themselves inside that world. And that’s why I love this stuff. It’s so great.
Here’s another one for you Vector Heart, Designers Republic nerds out there. I had no idea—they have this website here that I found. I don’t know why it keeps going to that. Something with my hotkeys is messed up right now. So apparently The Designers Republic has this website, Divine Rights, where you can actually go on here and buy a bunch of archives of their old flyers. So I’m going to have to pick up some stuff from here. You’ve got some stuff from Autechre, even Boards of Canada, and just tons of flyers. Apparently this one’s sold out, which is a bummer. But you can get all of these different flyers that they have. Good, clean, simple stuff. This is—I think this is the one. This is so great. And see, this is another great example—top right, obviously stealing some very Russian constructivism vibes here. So apparently, if you want a little piece of Designers Republic history in your own house, you can buy it on here. You get seven flyers for 135 bucks. Who’s got some money to spend?
Yeah, there’s so much great stuff on here. It’s so funny, because my personal aesthetic comes from more of a purely grid-oriented Swiss design kind of background. And it’s always so impressive to me—I love this aesthetic, I can’t create it. If a client came to me and was like, we need it to look like this, I would not be able to do it. I could maybe lead the charge on it, but this is—I feel like you have to find this type of designer specifically, because the level of expressiveness in it, I can’t get there. I’m too uptight. So go on here, buy some stuff.
And I think—I don’t know exactly the status of The Designers Republic these days. They’re still posting on Instagram. They gave some tease about 40 years of design, Divine Rights. Maybe that’s the—I don’t know if that’s the shop I just showed you, but they’re still active. One of their founders, Ian Anderson, is still out there causing trouble. I think he still occasionally does interviews and talks. But it’s been around for 40 years. So good on them for being absolute legends, and somehow—I mean, the fact that you could keep any agency alive—Parliament, we’ve been around for about 20 years now, and that’s an anomaly. The thought that you could hit 40 is just insane. I don’t know how any agency lasts that long, but they’ve always done great work.
So all right, I think that hits everything I wanted to hit with Wipeout. I think my favorite part of all of this is that idea of subvertising, where—it’s literally a portmanteau, I think, of subversive advertising, where you always invent this world and go a little bit deeper. That’s the stuff that I think—that’s the part where I’m like, I need to remind myself with everything, that always go that level deeper. Invent a little world.
I’ve been talking about mascots lately with clients, and I think we’re entering an era where mascots are going to be coming back for brands, given the way we’re feeling about AI and a need to rehumanize corporations. I think we’re going to probably be getting more mascots. And that’s just the reminder to me, like, really invent that mascot’s world. Go deeper in it. Give them a whole backstory. Give them a name. All of those things. Don’t just make it a simple illustration that goes on a generic tech website.
Oh, what is this? Someone said Ian is still doing stuff, and Michael C. Place is doing a version of the TDR look, but much more refined now. Oh, I’ll have to look that up. I haven’t seen any of his stuff. Is he just doing it—do you know, is he doing it under his own name, or does he have his own agency? Oh, here, let’s see what I can find over here. Studio Build. Oh, whoa. Okay, I had no idea that Studio Build was him. That’s hilarious. Him and his wife, huh? That’s crazy. Okay, well, here, I’ll throw it up on the screen here so everyone can see what I’m looking at. This is Studio Build, studio.build. I know—I follow him on everything, and somehow I totally missed that it was him. Their work is great. Oh, this demo stuff is so good. Let’s look at this.
All right, we’re just going design hunting now. Oh yeah, this is the look. Radical realism. It’s funny, there’s been a lot of discussion—you know, since I’ve talked some about that video game marathon that I’m obsessed with too, there’s been a lot of discussion about what do you really call some of this aesthetic? I know the guy who was the main art director on Marathon just started calling it graphic realism, which I kind of like, because it almost—I mean, I’d almost call it graphic hyperrealism if I was getting really nerdy about it, but I’m not a linguist, so I don’t know. Yeah, this stuff is great. All the little crosses in ASCII style. All right, this is good. Jared, thanks for reminding me of this. This is good.
All right, I’m going to be digging into this the rest of the day. I’ve got so much work to do, I’m so behind. I was kind of out the last few days of work, because unfortunately my wife’s grandpa died, and so it’s been a lot of family time. So this is like a frantically put-together livestream today, and so I’m so behind on all work, but I’m going to get a little distracted digging into this today. God, this stuff’s great.
Also, there’s good photography in these. I definitely struggle with the new era of portfolio design. You know, there’s like portfolios for agencies and designers especially go through kind of trends and cycles. I really struggle with the press-books-down-directly-onto-the-scanner-and-scan-them look. It just—I still struggle with it so bad, because I want to see the book in 3D space, and flattened out like that always is really a struggle for me. But maybe just because I’m old and I don’t get it—that’s always a possibility. Oh yeah, you can definitely see the TDR DNA for sure. So cool.
All right, I’m going to get into it. Oh yeah, send me some links. I also heard the term “highlighter punk” thrown around for Marathon. Oh, highlighter punk is great. I love that. Okay, I’m going to write that down. This is me writing things down old-school style. I want to look up—maybe this is another stream in the future, discussion of things like this, of what do you call highlighter punk and all of these different things.
But all right, I think that’s it for the day. We are almost at 1:00 my time. I guess I’ve got to go do some real work again. You know, do what Parliament actually pays me for here. Yeah, Ryan, fuel the tank, thanks. Thanks, everyone. This was great. Thanks for sharing awesome stuff. Let’s all go play some racing games, or in my case, I’ll probably be on Marathon tonight. So if anybody wants to try out some Marathon and experience highlighter punk in the flesh, hit me up.
Next week—I don’t exactly—since I was so behind this week with everything, I have no idea what we’re going to talk about next week, which I know is not helpful. But one thing that’s on my list that I might—I’ve been thinking, and I think it would relate to this really well—is I’ve just had this idea of how a lot of brands are really afraid to be ugly, or afraid to be interesting in that kind of absurdist way. And I think that can be a problem sometimes, and can strip a lot of brands of meaning. So I’m going to maybe dig into that here soon. So maybe that’ll be next week. We’ll talk about why brands are afraid to be ugly, and maybe some brands that do it right.
So thanks for another great stream, y’all. That was awesome. I’m super excited about Wipeout and that whole vibe. I’m going to go read the rest of this book and have a good rest of the day.