IGN Presents the History of Wrestling Games - IGN

When Vincent Kennedy McMahon bought the Capitol Wrestling Corporation from his father, Vincent J. McMahon, in 1982, he effectively carved the ancient sport of wrestling into two distinct categories: the real thing, and the really fun thing. Greco-Roman combat became a never-ending struggle between larger-than-life Faces and Heels, battling in a rigorously maintained kayfabe continuity of feuds and fragile alliances. Pro wrestling cut a fine distinction between sports and entertainment, athletes and superheroes. As concepts go, McMahon's World Wrestling Federation arrived on the scene ready-made for video game adaptation.

It didn't take long for gaming to jump into the squared circle with both feet... and a steel chair.

I Am the Game

Gaming's 8-bit era coincided with the rise of the WWF's Mania Era, but the first wrestling game completely ignored Mr. McMahon's fast-growing promotion. Instead, future Double Dragon developer Technos Japan pitted the Strong Bads (the inspiration behind the Homestar Runner character) against the Ricky Fighters for arcade rasslin' actioner The Big Pro Wrestling! in 1983. Grapples, throws, slams, and out-of-ring brawling were all represented. Three years later, it was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System as Tag Team Pro Wrestling. And it was awful.

The next year, Sega improved slightly on Tag Team's two-frame animations with Appoooh, a Japan-only release featuring wrestlers H.Hogen, A.Giants, and other thinly-veiled WWF superstars, minus any licensing fees. Technos followed suit - and vastly improved on their previous game - with coin-op gem Mat Mania, then added two-player versus mode in its Mania Challenge sequel. An officially licensed wrestling game wouldn't release until 1986, pulling its weirdly alien cast not from the flashy muscle men working for McMahon, but from M.U.S.C.L.E., a localized version of Dragonball-ish manga/anime Kinnijuman. Neither the gameplay nor the characters translated well.

In fact, early wrestling games did a lot better when they did their own thing. Two more titles hit in 1986, both brought something new and exciting to the genre, and both were called Pro Wrestling.

On the Sega Master System, Pro Wrestling was a super-deformed tag team mashup, mixing up grapples with knee drops, suplexes and aerial moves. More importantly, it introduced a rudimentary heal/face system to determine which teams could and couldn't fight each other, determined by another early innovation: optional in-ring weapons. Heel teams could pick up steel chairs - long regarded as basic wrestling equipment - and smack the opposition around with them. Faces merely banked points for grabbing the furniture first.

Sega's version would probably be more appreciated and better remembered if its namesake hadn't become one of the most beloved games on the NES.

Nintendo's Pro Wrestling didn't bring the thunder like other NES carts did, but it gave a memorable set of wrestlers, each with their own techniques, special moves, and button-combo strikes. Players not only won their title belt, but defended it as (or from) King Slender, Starman, Fighter Hayabusa, fish-man The Amazon, and finally the ultimate fighter, Great Puma, for the ultimate Video Wrestling Association championship. Players spent hours piledriving, plancha diving, and pinning each other in tournaments, and then went back for seconds. And thirds.

It was far from flawless. Cheap power-slamming moves abounded, the standard roundhouse kick was nearly undefeatable, a few wrestlers fought like coma victims and one loss could set a player's progress back hours. But pinning Great Puma became a feat worthy of the gods, and the goony translations led to the greatest affirmation in gaming history: "A Winner is You!"

Finally, gamers had a wrestling game they could take seriously. But after years of pseudo-names littering the sport, the heavy-hitting A-team was about to go on the card.

When Hulkamania Runs Wild On You

A few other wrestling titles parsed out through the next few years - Konami's The Main Event, and Sega's Robo Wres 2001 among them -- but most faded fast. More noteworthy, Tecmo World Wrestling followed Tecmo Bowl's success without matching it, though it did add reverses to the holds, color commentators, and a strange training mode run by a female taskmaster that presumably leveled up your wrestler through button-mashing push-ups. The effect seemed fairly negligible.

Part of the problem was that by 1988, wrestling fans had their favorites all picked out. They knew the WWF inside and out, religiously followed the damage week-to-week, and they just weren't seeing their draws on any console. That changed when Rare released WWF WrestleMania for the NES, the first licensed game to feature real wrestlers by name. Hulk Hogan himself performed his signature shirt-ripping move on the cover, and the Honky Tonk Man, Andre the Giant, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase joined the Hulkster inside the box.

Moves and spots were still basic, character designs were still semi-recognizable blocks, gimmicks and finishers were nearly absent, but it was all close enough. WWF WrestleMania had the WWF personality, and that got it over every other wrestling game before it. A monster franchise was born.

Technos got back into it with two popular arcade games - WWF Superstars in 1989 and WWF WrestleFest in 1991 - that pushed past WrestleMania in every way. The roster bumped up to include Big Boss Man and the Ultimate Warrior, and then added Jake "The Snake" Roberts, Sgt. Slaughter, and Mr. Perfect, and everyone looked and fought exactly the way they were supposed to. Royal Rumble modes and cage matches entered the picture. Grapples now folded into throws, ring throws, headlocks, slams, suplexes. Turnbuckle attacks, Irish whips, running attacks, running counter attacks, weaponry, tag-team matches and out-of-ring slugfests all went in. Bodyslams that would put "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan on his can wouldn't even faze the much bigger Andre the Giant, but Andre was low on aerial attacks. Only a few wrestlers got submission holds, while others moved much faster. Some would even try to drop if they took too much punishment, opening themselves up for an even bigger beating. The frequent six-man rumbles were punishing, entertainingly rare for the early 90's, and popped even on Rastar displays.

This was wrestling. Unfortunately, Technos left the genre after WrestleFest, and folded entirely in 1996.

Meanwhile, the WWF's real-world competition edged into gaming with hotshot 1990 release WCW Wrestling, featuring the Road Warriors - their star tag team - on the cover. It didn't impress. The sad fact was WCW Wrestling was nothing more than a model-swap screwjob of a year-old Japanese game, Super Star Pro Wrestling... not a bad game per se, but the WCW roster ended up using unfamiliar gimmicks borrowed from nonexistent grapplers. Fans were not fooled. Dusty Rhodes, Sting, Nature Boy Ric Flair, Rick Rude, Vader, and the rest of the WCW had to wait until 1994 for another shot, and that was blown, too. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System gave all kinds of opportunities, but WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling stuck with choppy graphics on an outdated isometric layout, and threw in poor controls as an unwanted bonus.

Compared to the previous year's Saturday Night Slam Masters, Capcom's masterful Street Fighter II-inspired wrestler, the WCW had dropped hard. Compared to WWF Royal Rumble, the WCW had just plain embarrassed itself. The WWF's second game on the next-gen SNES hardware (after the de rigor Super WrestleMania), and developer Sculpted Software's third WWF title (following the forgettable Superstars 2 and Steel Cage Challenge) fast became the standard by which all others were judged. Lineups varied between SNES and Sega Saturn ports, but the gameplay rocked no matter what you played it on. Between them, gamers had access to Bret "The Hitman" Hart, Yokozuna, The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, Papa Shango, Crush… a dozen fighters each, and half of them could be brawling away in the ring at once during the rumbles. One-on-one, tag and triple-tag modes were available, body splashes and atomic drops joined dozens of new moves, signature finishers, and the ever-popular steel chairs. You could even pull illegal moves after bumping out the Ref.

WCW SuperBrawl didn't have a hope in hell against it, and SuperBrawl's companion piece, WCW: The Main Event for the Game Boy, didn't fair any better. Its one claim to fame was the first-time inclusion of a then-unknown wrestler named Steve Austin.

The Attitude was coming.

'Cause Stone Cold Said So

And it got new standards to go by. The Fire Pro Wrestling series began innocently enough on the PC Engine in 1989, and largely flew under the radar for seventeen games in seven years. The eighteenth was Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium, and it wasn't anything close to innocent. It played the old real wrestler/fake name games to legally infringe copyrights, and also included an extensive character editor that let players build and save up to eighty additional fighters of their own.

But the real departures were in pacing and gameplay. SFPWXP ditched the old button-mash philosophy wrestling games had clung to for thirteen years, and went with timed button presses instead. And each match got progressively tougher as it went, starting with strikes and throws to bust the wrestlers down, ending with turnbuckle jumps, piledrives, suplexes... all the heavy hits to finish exhausted fighters off and get a dramatic pin.

Then, after several no-sells, the WCW caught up to the adults in every way. Newly formed AKI Corporation - a developer fully dedicated to wrestling games and nothing but - took the license and produced four brawlers in 1997 alone, two of which were WCW-branded. WCW vs. The World took a strong step towards 3D gaming on the PlayStation without putting a solid game behind it. But the WCW's defining New World Order storyline energized the wrestling world, and became the basis for WCW vs. nWo: World Tour over on the N64... a fully 3D brawler. That angle clicked hard.

World Tour was just as revolutionary as the nWo storyline it borrowed, with all moves built off holds instead of happening out of nowhere. Taunts were added for the first time, and a spirit gauge replaced simple health bars, allowing for crowd-pleasing superhuman comebacks. Suddenly, wrestling was all about the grapple again, and players loved it. The updated roster, including Hulk's turn to Hollywood Hogan, Kevin Nash (fresh off shedding his Diesel character at the Curtain Call), Rey Mysterio, Jr. and of course, Eric Bischoff, led to some truly badass gaming even if their movesets were a little off. Also included: a heavy roster of "fake" wrestlers... in fact, real fighters from Japanese promotions built for that country's localized port of the game, Virtual Pro Wrestling for the Nintendo 64. Ironically, for World Tour, their names were changed to avoid copyright issues.

Wrestling games backslid badly the next year with WCW Nitro, but between SFPWXP and World Tour's new mechanics and cutting-edge graphics, wrestling games had gone to a new plateau. They weren't niche games for diehard fans anymore... they were for anybody who appreciated a great video game.

WWF titles had taken something of a backseat since 1994's WWF Raw, their 16-bit swan song... memorable only for showcasing Doink the Clown and the late, great Owen Hart. WWF: In Your House featured Bret and Owen Hart, and the first game appearance of Triple H in a series of unimpressive non-ring home invasion fights. Midway's WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game looked and played more like Midway's Mortal Kombat; wrestlers even killed foes with purple magic. After those distractions, the WWF's comeback had to include a quantum leap over anything they'd done before.

It was called WWF Warzone, and while it didn't innovate like SFPWXP or World Tour did, it took those innovations and refined them to a sharp edge, and tightened up the controls to a shocking degree. Warzone boasted arguably one of the top rosters in wrestling history, headlined by the Rattlesnake himself, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. Right behind him were Triple H, Owen Hart, Kane, Mankind (and Cactus Jack, and Dude Love), Shawn Michaels, the Undertaker, Goldust, the British Bulldog, Ahmed Johnson, and Ken Shamrock, some of whom bolted the WWF by the time Warzone came out. And finally, The Rock had come to gaming.

More than anything, Warzone captured the WWF personality cold. Each wrestler recorded full motion video sequences, and everyone's entrance music was included (though only a few seconds played in-game). There was no shortage of Sharpshooters, Stunners, and Mandible Claws... minus Mr. Socko, who arrived on the scene much later. The WCW replied with WCW/NOW Revenge, expanding their own iconic roster (now including managers) with WWF refugees like Bret Hart and Roddy Piper and its home-grown champion Goldberg, plus authentic venues and style to burn.

Released in 1998, War Zone and Revenge were clear comebacks. And like most comebacks in wrestling, they were short lived.

Suck It!

By 1999, bitter competition between Vince McMahon's WWF and the Eric Bishoff-run WCW was paying off big for fans, as each promotion strove to top the other on an almost nightly basis. That carried over onto the gaming front with competing games - WCW/NOW Thunder and WWF Attitude - both of which bit it hard. Thunder boosted its roster to insane levels and let players pick the stable they wanted to rumble for (including the very popular Four Horsemen), but subtracted good controls. Some players even used the junky move set to emulate fairly accurate swing dance routines between Randy Savage and arch nemesis Hollywood Hogan. Attitude, the first wrestling game ported to the Dreamcast, set a high bar for wrestler customization, and set another one far, far lower for gameplay.

The real action was happening behind the scenes. Publisher Acclaim Entertainment's decades-old WWF license, stretching back all the way to WWF WrestleMania, ended in the finest pro wrestling tradition: with an unexpected double-cross. The WWF defected to THQ, the house behind every hit WCW game. Unwilling to share with their rivals, the WCW moved its brand over to Electronic Arts. Left out in the cold, Acclaim picked up the license for Extreme Championship Wrestling, which frequently cross-promoted with both the WWF and WCW. Unfortunately, after loosing its last television deal, the ECW declared bankruptcy in 2001 while still owing Acclaim money. Three years later, after only two junk ECW games (Hardcore Revolution and Anarchy Rulz), a nicely nostalgic Legends of Wrestling franchise, and increasingly shady business practices, Acclaim folded as well.

EA and THQ, however, kept the rivalry going strong. By late 1999, WCW Mayhem was out and generally underwhelming players, falling somewhere in the middle of the pack, where AKI's WWF WrestleMania 2000 soon arrived to keep it company. That update allowed a career progression through the various shows - RAW, Smackdown!, Sunday Night Heat - on the way to your own Pay-Per-View event and title match, but few cared to spend hours learning over-complicated button combos necessary for pulling of basic moves. Its great claim to fame was updating the roster once again to include new favorites like X-Pac and Chyna, as well as the WWF's greatest and most villainous trio: Stephanie, Shane, and Vince McMahon.

Two years of lackluster titles and a fast-approaching console war didn't bode well. Worse, THQ's next effort was an exclusive for the dying PlayStation built on the engine for Activision's Power Move Pro Wrestling, a four-year-old snoozer. THQ had yet to prove they knew how to handle the WWF. Expectations were not high.

That changed when WWF Smackdown! rolled out in early 2000.

Smackdown's graphics were better than the PlayStation deserved, and allowed four-year-old Japanese developer YUKE's Media Creations to do something entirely new for wrestling games: sell the moves. Wrestlers reacted to the pain, begged for mercy, and pounded the canvas when resisting a brutal submission move. Facial expressions and mannerisms were dead-on, from Stone Cold's mid-digit salute to The People's Eyebrow. Titantron footage backed entrances. And this time, YUKE's made sure the game was actually fun to play, chopping complex button schemes in favor of a simple and effective arcade-style system. Gamers took to it immediately.

The big roster, the Cage and Royal Rumble modes, the Career were all standard issue, but then YUKE's brought hardcore backstage throwdowns over from WCW Mayhem and beefed them up well past Mayhem's anemic rooms. Smackdown's out-of-ring slugfests smashed all the way out into the parking lot, where wrestlers smashed each other into cars. Special Referee matches let players play favorites with the calls and counts, and I Quit matches brought the humiliation. Few other games in any genre let you beat someone with a hospital gurney until they honestly needed one. The one noticeable absence was a total lack of voice work and smack talk.

Regardless minor problems, the drought was over. Smackdown! delivered, big-time. EA's answer was to repeat and compound the mistakes of In Your House with WCW Backstage Assault, a wrestling game that took place entirely in the backstage areas. It did so poorly, an easy port to the PlayStation 2 was cancelled.

Adding insult to EA's injury, THQ and AKI closed out 2000 - and the fifth generation consoles - with same-again Smackdown! 2, then refined the Smackdown! gameplay and options to produce one of the best wrestling games ever made: WWF No Mercy, a game that took everything WrestleMania 2000 did well, then did it better, Walk-ins with entrance music finally showed up (minus crowd cheers) leading players to, among other things, a ladder match mode that's still fondly remembered by those who jumped into the chaos. The crowd passed out weaponry to their favorite draws, and just about anything else in reach - from the ringside bell to the ringside steps - was good for a fast beat-down. Reverses, knockouts, turnbuckle fun, and submission tactics all got a bump from previous versions, and animations for everything were impressively smooth. It was tough to get an advantage in any match, and oh so satisfying when you finally did. AKI even threw in the best create-a-wrestler feature to date to seal their hold on the new benchmark of wrestling games.

An N64 sequel to No Mercy, WWF Backlash, was in early development when the N64's lifecyle ended. The GameCube, PlayStation 2, and newcomer Xbox were on the horizon, and bigger hardware meant bigger games. They soon got a bigger stable to use as a series of corporate mergers made it easy for Vince McMahon to move in and buy out the WCW. Soon after, he folded in what remained of the ECW. In just a few short months in 2001, the WWF had more than doubled it size and become the pro wrestling organization in America, and the single largest promotion in the world.

For better or worse, the competition was over. The big question now was where the licenses would go, and what kind of games would result.

Know Your Role and Shut Your Hole

The numbers alone settled it. Despite missteps, THQ made great games that sold well; EA's few title shots were all stillborn. While the WWE sorted out its expanded talent pool through the Invasion storyline, the gaming industry now had half the publishers and developers working to translate all those brawlers to sixth gen consoles. The days of fast turnarounds and multiple releases every year were over.

So, it seemed, were the innovations that constant competition brought. The third Smackdown!, YUKE's Just Bring It for the PS2, came out a year after its predecessor, too soon after the mergers to add any WCW/ECW draws to the card, and delivered a weak experience to boot. YUKE's GameCube entry, WWE WrestleMania X8, also failed to splash with fans. THQ turned development for an Xbox launch brawler over to Anchor, Inc., a developer with only a few mixed-martial arts games to its name. Anchor missed the launch deadline, putting WWE Raw on shelves by early 2002 and showcasing some of the worst graphics and character animations on the fledging system. Across the board, nobody had come close to actually using that bigger hardware, or taken full advantage of the cross-promotion talent.

Fortunately, they all got it right for the sequels... shortly after the WWF ceased to exist.

A lawsuit by the World Wildlife Fund prompted an overnight name change from World Wrestling Federation to World Wrestling Entertainment in May, 2002. The first Raw game was quickly repackaged as WWE Raw, and WWE Raw 2 arrived in September 2003 with WCW superstar Goldberg on the cover. While it wasn't the perfect game, Anchor improved on the first Raw in every conceivable way, and the combined WWF/WCW/ECW rosters had fully integrated. Once-fantasy matches were called up with ease: Steve Austin vs. Hulk Hogan, Booker T vs. Chris Jericho, tag-team matches with Randy Orton, Rey Mystero, Jr., Ric Flair, Kurt Angle, Goldberg, The Rock.

The possibilities were amazing, and carried over to YUKE's WWE WrestleMania XIX for the Game Cube and Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain for the PS2. While XIX wasn't anything special (though far short of a disaster, despite an all-backstage story mode), the new Smackdown was revered as the best of the series. Damage was tracked by location, so players could target specific areas to really mess an opponent up. Spirit meters were replaced by individual stats, and stamina was tracked for both wrestlers during submission holds. It played fast and tight, brought the WWE Legends rosters into the series, and added new match types, notably First Blood and the always classy Bra and Panties fights.

All three hit within a month of each other, and each was a success in its own right. Going forward, however, THQ let both Anchor, Inc. and the WrestleMania brand go. The only attention given to the Xbox was one final Wrestlemania title, Studio Gigante's disastrous WrestleMania 21, which initially shipped as an unfinished beta loaded with bugs, glitches, and absent features. The completed game wasn't so great, either. Studio Gigante, founded by the creators of Mortal Kombat, vanished soon after. YUKE's was now THQ's sole wrestling developer, producing Day of Reckoning titles for the GameCube, Smackdown! for the PlayStation 2.

Both Reckoning games were sturdy and fun, but generally unappreciated on the generally unappreciated GameCube. When Nintendo moved off the Cube, they left the Reckoning series behind. After Shut Your Mouth, a minor roster update to Here Comes the Pain, THQ rolled the Smackdown brand together with Raw's in 2005 for the enduring WWF Smackdown! vs. Raw. The first SvR only offered small improvements on previous Smackdowns, but fluid animation and depth of gameplay sometimes made you forget there were only a set number of spots to execute. It simply looked that good... the best sell to date, bar none. It also added an online match feature, fairly thin compared to others, but still a first for any wrestling game.

THQ made the franchise official one year later with Smackdown! vs. Raw 2006, taking a page out of Madden NFL's yearly update playbook.

To Be the Man, You've Gotta Beat the Man

But the 2006 edition - featuring Batista and John Cena on the box - didn't simply juggle talent around for the easy update.

Stamina and momentum now determined how your match played out by draining your fighter and building him up, and instead of every combatant getting variants of the same attacks, each was assigned four out of seven attacks, forcing a change of tactics for every card. Voice work, long a weak spot, finally hit home with real trash talk and real angles from real wrestlers. Buried Alive matches, stealing taunts, playing possum for a sneak attack, and a Manager mode were small but welcome touches. Trumping those, SvR 06 synched to its PSP port so you could take your career on the road, then continue it at home without interruption.

By contrast, SvR 07's one interesting twist was removing grapple functions from a face button and mapping it to the right analog stick. It also returned the franchise to a Microsoft console, debuting on the Xbox 360 just a few short months before Def Jam Icons showed up to heat up the competition once again.

Left out in the cold since 2001's license shift, EA and AKI put their WCW Mayhem engine to use building a fighting game franchise based on Def Jam Record's stable of rap and hip-hop artists. The first, 2003's Vendetta, did well. The second, Fight for NY, won Best Fighting Game honors at E3 2004. While it could only be loosely called a wrestling game, Def Jam filled a niche that the WWE left wide open by concentrating on the PS2 while the Xbox 360 enjoyed a year-long head start in the seventh generation console war. Even YUKE's hedged its bets in 2006 with Rumble Roses XX, a sequel to their PS2-exclusive female rasslin' game co-developed with Konami. The WWE wouldn't put a game on a next-gen console until the close of 2007.

When they did, Smackdown vs. Raw 2008 faceplanted right into the canvas. The ninth installment in the franchise could boast the best graphics and new fighting styles, then self-sabotaged with a career mode that forced players to maintain a delicate balance between popularity and injury by not over-using their fighter... i.e. by not fighting. Since there wasn't much else to do, the career mode tended to lag. Even the always-dependable roster fell short, highlighting many, many out-of-date choices. Everything else was unchanged from 07, and unremarkable.

The one saving grace was that TNA iMPACT!, the first game out of upstart promotion Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, didn't do any better. Midway's long-sought license brought back old WCW favorites Booker T, Kurt Angle, Kevin Nash, and Sting, and showcased TNA's signature Ultimate X matches, but shallow gameplay quickly sunk the nostalgia.

But there's no such thing as a wrestler who doesn't get savagely beat down, and then come back to dish it out worse than they got it.

Smackdown vs. Raw is back for its '09 iteration, and if it's still not the sport perfected, it has pressed out the errors of the past. The roster is back in shape, reflecting Smackdown, Raw, and ECW (resurrected as a division back in 2006). Wrestlers get their own specific storylines, Inferno matches join all the returning favorites, and tag team mechanics have been completely revamped. Appropriate enough, given D-Generation X's staring role on the box.

There still hasn't been a five-star wrestling game for the current console generation, but there's always SvR X, XI, and beyond. YUKE's is also building up buzz for WWE Legends of WrestleMania - inherited from the late Acclaim - with a video recreating the legendary WrestleMania III bout between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. Legends promises a return to arcade-style, grapple-based wrestling, and hints at the possibility of run-ins and in-match interference from managers and valets. Certainly, they have a huge legacy to draw from... and live up to.

Whether you consider it a fake sport, sports entertainment, silly melodrama, or just plain amazing, it's tough to beat the theatrics and eye-popping gimmicks that fuel professional wrestling today. In the last few decades, it's virtually become a never-ending saga of good vs. evil, heroes vs. anti-heroes vs. villains, strident individuals vs. stringent corporations. Translating those lofty themes to a video game was never going to be easy, and some of the personality is bound to get lost along the way. But wrestling games have been around almost as long as gaming itself, and it's come a long way from the blocky NES days. The genre, like the WWE, reinvents itself with regularity, injecting new ideas to keep itself fresh and exciting, and swerving just when fans think they know what's next. Just like game development.

You never know. That next unexpected turn could be the one that finally lets fans feud with each other and the superstars of the WWE alike, get over foes, get heat from fans, and build a legend of their own.