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wipE'out'' Starting Line: CoLD SToRAGE and the Zero Gravity Soundtracks

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wipE'out'' Starting Line: CoLD SToRAGE and the Zero Gravity Soundtracks
Premiering in November of 2023, Lapsus Records of Barcelona published wipE'out'': The Zero Gravity Soundtrack, revisiting music from the Psygnosis-developed anti-gravity racing games wipE′out″ and wipE′out″ 2097.

All music is written and produced by Tim Wright (CoLD SToRAGE), known for iconic Amiga titles, including Lemmings and Shadow of the Beast 2. The three-disc vinyl publication features remixes by Kode9, μ-Ziq, Brainwaltzera, Simo Cell, Wordcolour, James Shinra, Surgeons Girl, and Dattassette, complemented by striking artwork by Barcelona-based independent design team Basora.

Independent music distributor Forced Exposure has slated the North American premiere of The Zero Gravity Soundtrack Vol.2 for January 23rd, drawn from the composer's original archives. The second volume features remixes by Tim Reaper, SHERELLE, Mantra, and NikNak, arranging music from wipE′out″ HD and wipE′out″ Pure—later installments in the Psygnosis-developed anti-gravity racing game series. These selections are complemented by Sega Saturn alternative mixes.

Here, the composer provides a glimpse into the origins of the Zero Gravity albums.


In the early '70s, Tim Wright relocated with his family to a 65-acre farm in rural Wales to tend a herd of dairy cows. The eldest of five siblings, he was surrounded by an overwhelming variety of sounds.

Insects buzzed, interspersed with the moo's of the cows. The purrs of "at one point, way too many cats" lined the foreground, while far away one could hear the sounds of encroaching foxes and birds of prey.

"And thinking back, I've always been obsessed with the stereoscopic field," the musician recalls of moving to the farm. "To the point where I would cup my hands behind my ears, where I could actually hear the phase shifting in all of the sounds that were coming in—that kind of band-pass filtering."

"I'd say to my brothers, 'Hey, if you do this, can you hear that sound?'

"And they'd go, '...No.'”

wipE'out'' - The Zero Gravity Soundtrack by CoLD SToRAGE on Bandcamp

The musician created his own demos for the Amiga, teaching himself computer programming while utilizing the 4-channel Paula sound chip. With his friends Lee Carus and Alan McCarthy, he presented "Puggs in Space" to Psygnosis Limited at the Personal Computer World Show (PCW), impressing the company's representatives.

His initiative earned him a foot in the door of the industry. By the early '90s, Wright's music had found a wide audience, having been featured in Psygnosis' blockbuster puzzle game Lemmings.

His first game score incorporating CD-quality audio was for first-person shooter Krazy Ivan, sporting an industrial techno score. Psygnosis had a base of operations at the Century Buildings in Liverpool's Brunswick Business Park, the origins of A Flock of Seagulls and the Beatles.

He recalls the high ceilings of the converted textile warehouse sucked heat aloft, rapidly dissipating warmth in the winter. Rain asserted its presence by pounding the roof in a thunderous cacophony. Having acclimated himself to harrowing weather conditions in his childhood, amidst leisure activities like riding scrambler motorcycles and carving wood with a pocket knife, Wright was unfazed by the noise and chill.

The musician hung a sign outside the front door, designating his studio the "Cold Storage."

wipE'out'' - The Zero Gravity Soundtrack Vol.2 by CoLD SToRAGE on Bandcamp

Krazy Ivan places the player in the role of a Russian mech pilot, defending the Earth from invading alien robots. "I was still in the position of trying to learn how do you write CD quality music... I'd just come from writing everything on an Amiga."

He played around with a shortwave radio amidst the frigid cold and rain pelting the roof. "I knew which radio bands you could tune into. There are some sounds in there... the occasional song or melody being played from some far off land, maybe even Russia itself, with a lot of hiss over the top. Stuff like that was thrown in."

However, development on Krazy Ivan took a back seat when Sony acquired Psygnosis in 1993, throwing what Wright describes as an "obscene amount of money" at the studio.

"They were looking for various publishers and developers around the world. They went, "Okay, well, for the UK, we're gonna go with Psygnosis." Sony would aggressively market the futuristic anti-gravity racing game, dubbed wipE′out″, to showcase the processing power of the PlayStation hardware.

The Zero Gravity Soundtrack

Owing to the generous investment from Sony, Wright graduated from the Cold Storage warehouse. The musician was afforded a custom music studio in Wavertree Technology Park, designed to match British Broadcasting Corporation standards. The sound team was granted their pick of equipment.

"It was two in-house musicians—[myself] and Mike Clarke, sitting down and combing through Sound On Sound magazine and just going, 'Well, that looks like a bloody cool mixer.'"

Part of the lavish budget allowed for the licensing of popular electronica for the wipE′out″ soundtrack. Lead designer Nick Burcombe pointed out the incongruity of a common name appearing alongside The Chemical Brothers, New Order, Orbital, and The Prodigy. Wright suggested "Cold Storage." Carus, having served as a graphics designer on Shadow of the Beast, created a 3D logo that invented the capitalized “CoLD SToRAGE” stylization.

Forward planning at that crucial turning point paved the way for the musician's remastering of wipE′out″ music decades later. "I made a deal with Sony's legal team that we would have co-ownership of the music," he explains. "I had the foresight to do that, which meant that I owned it, but they obviously had it for use within the product." 

Slipstream - the Music from wipE'out''

Psygnosis partnered with a graphic design studio based in Sheffield, England, known as The Designers Republic, investing their iconic visual branding in the launch of the franchise. Wright was operating under the implicit assumption that he would furnish studio-quality trance techno, a genre largely unfamiliar to him, to match that benchmark of visual design.

"I remember the tension and the worry and everything of the first composition for wipE′out″," he recalls. "Whether that was true, I don't know. But to me, it felt like there was an initial pressure to produce at least one track where it was agreed, 'That's good!'"

Columbia pressed the soundtrack CD in 1995, passing over Wright's music tracks due to an apparent licensing snafu. "And I'd got pissed off that they didn't put any of my music on the official albums." He was assured that with the sequel already in preproduction, record companies were "banging on the door" to get his in-game tracks properly distributed.

"I'd been getting fan mail sent to CoLD SToRAGE, which freaked me out, along with little gifts," he says. "That was a bizarre experience."

Slipstream 2 - the Music from wipE'out''

For the sequel, titled wipE′out″ 2097, the musician challenged the preconceived notion that a rapid tempo was a prerequisite of a high-speed racing game soundtrack. "If the ships are flying along really quickly, the easiest way of emphasizing doing that is a breakneck BPM." Composing the CoLD SToRAGE track known as "Canada," Wright went "Nah," and "just kept dropping the BPM until it was like porridge, and then just stepped it up again."

"So I went down to the developers and said, 'Right, I've written a track. Can you just show me what it's gonna look like in the game?'”

A member of the marketing department joined in to observe the resulting demo, with "Canada" implemented. "This was a definite different kind of feeling," the composer observed.

The marketing representative took immediate notice, mentioning to the devs, “That's a real corker! Is that something you guys have just put in from a CD or is it one of the actual tracks?”

Wright took this as an indication that his experimentation with tempo had panned out.

The Zero Gravity Soundtrack

Growing up, the musician developed a love of the kind of sci-fi narratives that informed the lore surrounding the wipE'out'' universe. His immersion in UK-centric fiction, from Blake’s 7 to Doctor Who, was counterbalanced with a fascination for real-life scientific research conducted at NASA.

At his studio Shoe Box Under The Shady Pines, he remastered his wipE'out'' duology, up-sampling the CoLD SToRAGE tracks to 64 bits at 192 kilohertz. "I thought the Wirral—the peninsula between Wales and Liverpool—was perfect," Wright says of the Northwestern England locale. "You've got a sort of a mild countryside, access to parks, trees, beaches."

As an adult, the musician communicated his love of astronomy to his young son. Together they made visits to the Wirral Astronomical Club, where large telescopes were trained at the sky. He recalls waking up his son around midnight and driving to a field in Wales to have a picnic.

"It was a brilliantly clear night, no moon. And I was pointing out various star constellations. And he was quite surprised to see this kind of vague smear across the entire sky, multicolored."

Forced Exposure (USA) - wipE'out" - The Zero Gravity Soundtrack Vol. 2

Bandcamp - wipE'out'' - The Zero Gravity Soundtrack Vol. 2