Remember how crazy WipEout’s graphics were back in the day on PlayStation? All those weird and wonderful shapes and colours?
Thanks to The Designers Republic that was all possible but due to a serious of unfortunate events happening ”all at once” they had to close, reveals Founder Ian Anderson.
”We’d lost a couple of clients, didn’t win a couple of pitches, got a tax bill which should have been sorted out and wasn’t and a major client who didn’t pay the money they owed us - in themselves any of those things would have been fine but when they come all at once there’s not much you can do,” Anderson tells Creative Review.
”I want to go back to what DR was,” he continued. ”It does feel like the end of an era but really it stopped being DR two or three years ago.”
”Working hands-on and not through account managers. I’ve never liked that agency model - it’s not where creativity lies. DR accidentally ended up there in order to service bigger clients.”
”I’m not being ungrateful to the people who ran the business side at DR - it wasn’t their fault. I’m glad we did it - it took getting there to make me realise that it wasn’t where I wanted to be.”
Now that’s what you get when embracing the Republic lifestyle …who knows what could have been if they’d chosen a Constitutional Monarchy instead? WipEout has lost a piece of its history, a British piece at that!
