History of Wrestling Games

Written by GT Staff  on August 18, 2006

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The Modern Day: Suplexes and Shuffling
The beginning of the current generation of wrestling games was an ominous one. Early in 2001, WCW was purchased by the WWF, ending years of heated competition between them. ECW fell around the same time and also ended up being acquired by Vince McMahon and company. With that, two wrestling licenses went poof, leaving Acclaim and EA without any wrestling games. Along with that, the acquisitions marked the end of the recent wrestling boom, and thus the audience for grappling games thinned out.

Though lacking the ECW license, Acclaim wasted no time getting a wrestling game ready for the next generation. Instead of doing a game with some low-budget independent wrestling league, or going the route of fictional characters, they went the legendary route, which hit the PS2 in 2001 (and was the PS2's first wrestler) and later on Xbox and GameCube. Dubbed Legends of Wrestling, this game put you in the boots of old-timers like Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart, Ted DiBiase, Randy Savage, and the sort, comprising a who's who of old-school wrestling. Thankfully, Acclaim saw fit to redesign the game engine, so this wasn't the WWF Attitude engine redone, though it wasn't exactly Smackdown, either. The gameplay was slow and deliberate, but not all that bad. LOW took a unique, old-school route to its career mode, as you went through 'territories' to become their champion, and then moved along to become the overall unified champion. Along with that, the lone wrestling license left, WWF, saw its first next-generation game in WWF Smackdown 3. While the original games were great, Smackdown 3 was a huge step back, thanks to a short, mediocre career mode, and a generally rushed feel; this one seemed like a quick cash-in seeing there was no real competition anymore. It also didn't help that the game took a whopping 4MB of memory card space, for apparently no reason at all. At the least, the gameplay was still quality Smackdown, but it was more a vehicle for wrestler creation than any long-term replay.

In early 2002, THQ finally shipped WWF Raw, the debut wrestling game for the new Microsoft Xbox, after missing the November 15th launch window. THQ employed Japanese company Anchor to design this game, and the results were mixed. The game was a bit light on features, especially seeing the potential of the Xbox (i.e. no custom soundtrack option), and the gameplay was a bit sluggish and overcomplicated at times. WWF Raw was also infamous for having some really bad character animations that sometimes resembled the stick-in-ass syndrome. There was definitely potential, though, as Anchor was a quality developer who had done good solid games in the past. Not long after that, the debut GameCube wrestling game appeared with WWF WrestleMania X8. The irony of this GCN title was it was designed by Yukes, the team that also handles the Smackdown games. However, WMX8 was a much different game, with more complicated game mechanics and an increased sense of realism. Like WWF Raw, the game didn't really utilize next-generation potential, as it didn't have a huge career mode, but the potential was there for something really good.

When fall arrived, so did the legends again. Legends of Wrestling II found its way to stores, though there weren't a whole lot of improvements. The career mode was basically the same, but it featured feuds within territories to make things a bit more realistic. The legend count was increased to bring in even more stars like Roddy Piper, Jerry Lawler, and the late Owen Hart. In many ways, the best aspect of LOWII wasn't even interactive; the game featured some great DVD interviews with almost every star included in the game...mostly the ones who are still alive. Also like clockwork, the WWF, now renamed World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, reemerged with WWE Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth. Following the disappointing Smackdown 3, SYM was a massive improvement, with a great career mode, a fantastic creation engine, and a massive lineup of WWE stars from both the Raw and Smackdown factions. The gameplay was far more refined as well, slowing down the pace in an attempt to make the action more strategic, but keeping the pick-up-and-play mechanics in place. It was a positive step forward for the genre.

Though the WCW was gone, Electronic Arts didn't waste much time before releasing a new wrestling game, using perhaps the weirdest license yet - Def Jam Recordings. Dubbed Def Jam Vendetta, this AKI-developed title (for the PS2 and GameCube) mixed great, albeit unusual wrestling action with a hip-hop theme, which pretty much nailed two markets at once. The career mode saw you take your fictional character through numerous 'territories' all held by Def Jam artists like DMX, Ludacris, Method Man, and the like. Along the way, you earned a girlfriend who would have catfights over you, and you could collect photos of the real models rendered in the game. So it was a bit unusual and definitely targeting the hip-hop fans. But at the same time, the game played superbly, with enough depth and action for wrestling fans to overlook the unusual plot and theme.

The action was a bit over-the-top, with physically impossible finishing maneuvers, but it was still otherwise grounded in reality, making this a great 'closet' grappler for the average WWE fan. It should be noted that in 2004, EA released a sequel in Def Jam: Fight for New York, but the game went way off its wrestling roots and thus doesn't qualify as a real wrestling game. It would be like saying Tekken is a wrestling game because King does suplexes and an odd piledriver.

Following that springtime release of Vendetta, it was a quiet time for wrestling games, until late summer when a trio of WWE games found their way onto shelves. First was the vastly improved WWE Raw 2, which fixed many of the problems of the original, and thus was a whole lot more entertaining. The create-a-wrestler setup allowed for dozens of awesome creations, and thanks to the Xbox hard drive, you could put custom theme music in the game for a more realistic feel - it's not much fun creating Bret Hart if you can't use his intro music. The Career mode was expanded into something endless, as your wrestler got into feuds, either automatically or started on your own, and could rack up numerous championships from both sides of the WWE roster. Raw 2 was still a bit more complicated than its fellow WWE games, but it was much more playable compared to its predecessor, opening it up to a wider audience.

Right about the same time, WWE WrestleMania XIX shipped for the Cube, following up X8 with (like Raw 2) a more refined gameplay system. It also had a far mode in-depth career mode and creation setups. In the wrestling game trend, XIX was in many ways the same game as X8, just with an updated roster and some new moves and match types. Like X8, the game was hardly bad, but it wasn't a standout, either. Finally, there was the yearly Smackdown update. Fully in its prime now, Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain built upon the same ideas as its predecessor, but added a damage system that made you inflict pain on your opponents in specific areas of the body if you really wanted to wear them down. In reality, that was the only real major addition to the mix, as the game mostly played the same as every other Smackdown game, most especially Shut Your Mouth. The career mode was fixed up to work in two ways - bring an established star into the mix with their default attributes, or create a grappler and earn those skills by winning matches and eventually championships.

In comparison to previous years, 2004 was pretty quiet. After a year off, Acclaim brought their Legends series back, with Showdown: Legends of Wrestling. Designed to be much more fast-paced than its predecessors, Showdown was a decent title, but it was doomed by general apathy to non-WWE games and of course Acclaim's demise not long after the game released. Not too long after that, the WWE returned to the GameCube, but the WrestleMania name was long-gone. Redubbed WWE Day of Reckoning, DoR still was designed in the fashion of the last two GCN titles, but again featured expanded options and career modes. Though still designed by Yukes, Day of Reckoning lagged behind Smackdown in popularity, though it was pretty well liked by Cube players. Its action was fast and fluid, which counts for something. Finally, again the Smackdown series returned, in Smackdown vs. Raw. That's right, after three years of division, someone finally thought to title the game in this fashion. SVRK again wasn't an evolution, but it featured some cool stuff. Legends made their way into the game, and they were big guys like Bret Hart, Ted DiBiase, and Roddy Piper, for starters, along with newer legends like The Rock and Steve Austin, both of whom weren't in WWE employ at the time. For most, though, SVR was huge because it had online play - a first for the genre. It wasn't really much to shout about, seeing how it supported very few players and had basic match types, but it was progress.

Last year, like 2004, was also pretty quiet. The year's first game was WWE WrestleMania XXI, designed by Studio Gigante. This title had lots of potential, especially with the vaunted Xbox Live support and the would-be innovative reversal system. However, the game was released with so many glitches, broken components, and missing features that it was more than alarming to almost all who played it. Was it the missing Xbox Live support on day one that had to be patched in? The laggy matches that ensued once you actually got online? Maybe it was the terrible gameplay that was ridiculously one-sided because of mo-capped animation or the slew of missing game modes and odd design choices. Really, there wasn't much to like about this game, and it was the final insult to Xbox wrestling game fans, as they really were denied a quality or even reasonable wrestling product all the way through the console's lifespan.

Then came WWE Day of Reckoning 2 from Yukes, which, once again, continued the narrative from the first Day of Reckoning title. This game added some engine refinements that allowed for easier countering of strikes, but the title still continued with its heritage (from No Mercy) of play that relied on area-specific damage and "spirit" meters. The GameCube may not have had the online play of the Xbox or PS2 games of this generation, but it certainly got some reasonably entertaining games that quietly represented the wrestling game genre fairly well.

Finally, there was Smackdown vs. Raw 2006, signaling that THQ was going to settle on this name rather than crazy catchphrases. SVR 06 featured all new legends, some new gametypes, a slightly improved online play (still not 21st century, though), and largely unchanged gameplay. The game had one cool option, and that's the linkup to the PSP version that released a bit later than the PS2 version. You could play the your career on either console and transfer it back and forth to keep it going whether you were at home or on the road. Pretty cool, and it actually worked compared to Madden NFL 06's confusing linkup earlier in the year.

That leads us to today. As of right now, WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2007 is on the card for a late 2006 release on the Xbox 360 and a 2007 release on the PS3. As for the current lineup of hardware, the biggest news has been surrounding Midway, who have acquired the rights to the WWE's biggest competition in years, Total Nonstop Action (better known as TNA), and plan to release the first of those games on PS2 and Xbox this year. But what of the next generation? In short, we need to evolve the genre. Smackdown hasn't really innovated in years, and that's the flag bearer. We're a long way from the 32-bit era, which was likely the defining era for wrestling games due to the variety and originality of the content. We're not seeing this anymore, and that's unfortunate, as the corporate machine won't allow for much innovation and original concepts like we used to see. We've seemed to hit a ceiling in wrestling games, as this tour through history demonstrates. We've come a long way, but at the expense of the old days, when wrestling games could be counted on to be different year after year. Perhaps Midway's TNA license will lead the charge to a new path to the next generation of grappling, or hopefully it will at least motivate the WWE (or some outside party) to try something that isn't from the same old playbook.