German designer brings Wipeout racing game to life, burns up cardboard tracks with an R/C car (video)
By Sean Hollister 
posted August 5th 2010 9:44AM
posted August 5th 2010 9:44AM
posted August 5th 2010 9:44AM
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Making F-Zero a reality should be next!
@Olwood
Very Yes!
@Olwood
I think we'd need it to exist at a life-sized scale first though. Unfortunately, that's a long way off : \
@Olwood Venita K? I want mercedes benz to make a Alnupha Pass tack, or better yet a Sol2.
@Olwood
Awesome highscore system at 02:40!
LOL, that's awesome! I couldn't imagine how much time was sunk into this project though. Love the graffiti on the walls in the background too.
@Crim
The maker said he spent two months on it
Awesome.
@Av4ry
More like effing awesome!!
i'll take 3!
I must.... have... one....
@johnvillar
what? German?
I love it !
Reminds me more of Powerdrome on the Amiga than of Wipeout, but I guess this designer is quite young and he's never heard of it.
@thewild
He really should add at least another car though !
@thewild powerdrome #1 http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/powerdrome_/cover-art/gameCoverId,95350/
@thewild Love your avatar. I keep hearing "click" click" when I look at it :)
@Insomnihack
A floppy disk that could play tunes, how could anybody ever beat this king of hardware ? Amiga forever !
;-)
only thing missing are weapons
@kreatos yes, bb guns with pressure pads at the rear of the vehicle that'll tell the vehicle to slow down.
@kreatos and boost from the >>>'s
@kreatos
you seem to be forgetting floating cars. What's Wipeout with wheels, right?
I would imagine a car with a wider/longer wheel base would make it considerably less crash-prone. I would also figure out a way to have it with a slightly more gradual acceleration curve, so it doesn't feel like you're going from 0 to insane in 2.2 seconds.
@LoadStar I'm guessing that the batteries/lights on top raise the center of gravity which doesn't help. Probably one of the things they will tweak if they keep working on it.
@LoadStar : Yes I agree, he just needs to tune the gameplay a bit.
I'm pretty sure that just adding some gears would take care of the acceleration curve.
@LoadStar I think they need to smooth out the track more, whatever material he put warped and has bumps all over..
Sod it.. All he needs is a track made out of magnets, and an RC hovercraft with a negative pole on the underside.
@perpetual98 as small as today's hardware is they can get this down to scale ... plus the camera would be pretty clear without the static/noise etc...
Just takes money - which they did this on a "budget" :)
@I like things "MAGNETS, HOW-"....must resist...
The road is of similar to construction paper/posterboard, remember, he IS in an office setting
I'd definitely walk down to the local creepy abandoned building to play this game.
i love wipeout and this is a really cool rendition of it.
ON ANOTHER NOTE!
this is the first time in a long time that i've seen a whole front page of news articles where not one is an apple article! I almost lost faith engadget.:P
THAT IS COOL. only thing missing are jumps..i want to build this in my office for happy hours..lol
Doesn't anyone work in Europe?
@rbs That's rich! Germany exports more than the US!
Germany and France hasn't been in "recession" for a year now, how's the US doing?
Oh, and German unemployment has fallen the last 12 months, the US numbers have increased...
@andrewh12 We're imploding in on ourselves just fine, thank you very much. XD
i can imagine a mario kart like race with traps and jumps and middle aged men betting on whose gonna come in first place..
Yeah i would be single for life if i had access to it.
He should totally take it a step further and map out the track on a computer so it updates in real-time while he is racing
Seems like it "Wiped me Out"!
This is a very cool idea. I'm pretty sure the future will be more like this, with man controlling robots to do their bidding.
He should make the car controllable via computer keyboard. Hook up the wireless cars onto the internet and charge people to race them. And by 'them' I'm saying he should make a several other cars and people from around the world can control them to have races.
It's like auto racing without having to be in the car.
@ushneb internet slot car racing?
Wipeout GP, accepting wagers!
@ushneb I just hope your latency is really low when playing online!
The future of F1 Racing perhaps?
@Nagi
F1 stand for Ferrari-cheaters.
they need rockets,bombs,machine guns and lazer it needs to be able to SHOOT something,add like rocket engines to the rcs and have like 20 ppl racing it and would be uber cool.
awesome, i need to build something like this :)
Needs to add a missile launcher to the car.
He was quiet. Polite. Kept mostly to himself.
Sick x1000!
Wipeout is such a choice game.
Would be awesome if the cars could hover! I wonder if this would work: he could make a copy of this track and put it over this one, and put the car on the top track with a magnet on the bottom of the car. The bottom track would have magnets of the same strength. The model ship with the camera will have a magnet of the opposite polarity, so that it suspends between the car up top and the track. When the car moves, the model will be attracted to the magnet of the car up top, so it will move too.
I wonder what the best laptime is??? I WANT TO BREAK 'M!!
This is awesome. But the guy really needs to partner with some RC nerds. They've been doing custom tracks, first person video and the like for years - and they're quite good at it.
I'm sure they'd be able to turn this excellent proof of concept into a full-featured video game / RC hybrid.