Sony President Says Wipeout Could Return Someday

Wipeout was a fast-paced, futuristic racing game Sony published on the original Playstation. There were several sequels afterward, all made by Liverpool Studio, an English branch of Sony’s wider game-developing business.

In 2012, citing “an increasingly competitive marketplace,” Sony shut down Liverpool Studio for good. “Liverpool Studio has been an important part of SCE Worldwide Studios since the outset of PlayStation, and have contributed greatly to PlayStation over the years. Everyone connected with Liverpool Studio, past and present, can be very proud of their achievements. However, it was felt that by focusing our investment plans on other Studios that are currently working on exciting new projects, we would be in a stronger position to offer the best possible content for our consumers.”

The question was, where did that leave Wipeout? Would it be tossed aside like the rest of the once-thriving game franchises that weren’t deemed important enough in this cuttthroat AAA business? Recently Sony’s president, Shuhei Yoshida, spoke at a Q&A session during EGX in London. He was asked about the possibility of Wipeout ever coming back, and replied that it was fully possible.

“There are many IPs that we kind of stopped iterating with new games,” he told the press. “One of the reasons is we always love to work on new IP. From my standpoint I try to balance the number of games in a franchise. In the future there might be a chance to come back to a game like Wipeout.”

So there it is. Not likely in the immediate future, but not impossible in the distant future either. Wipeout will be back someday, just not tomorrow.