Speed through Wipeout's PlayStation-era tracks in your browser

Even if you're complete garbage at Wipeout (like me), you can still enjoy of all its fuzzy-textured PlayStation tracks right in your browser. Game developer and web tinkerer Dominic Szablewski has completely reverse engineered all the courses for Wipeout and Wipeout 2097/XL for WebGL-enabled exploring.

Zipping along the pre-set flythrough for each level is hypnotically smooth, at least after you get past the cognitive dissonance of not slamming into every damn corner for once in your life. It's also surprisingly calming when you don't have to worry about outpacing other futuristic hover racers, especially with '90s electronica crunching along in the background.

Don't let the effortless feel blind you to Szablewski's struggle; extracting all the geometry and textures from a launch-era PlayStation title, then breaking them down so they made a lick of sense to anybody outside Psygnosis, was no small task. He ended up coding "about 800 lines of JavaScript to load and draw 3D scenes for a 20 year old game," according to his post-mortem writeup.

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