BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO: WRESTLING GAMES
The championship match is over, and standing in the middle of the ring is a 50-something former NFL player, a supremely intense individual who has his arm raised in victory. His opponent, a relentless horror movie monster who can be stunned but never truly stopped, will show up on TV tomorrow as his alter ego – an excitable but eminently unnerving children’s TV presenter. Yes, professional wrestling is preposterous. But we love Tekken, and that allows you to kick the face off the devil himself with a schoolgirl, so why not lean into the craziness? It’s well worth doing so, as wrestling games have evolved along very different lines to regular fighting games, and offer a totally different way of generating thrills that is much better suited to having more than two players.
The development of wrestling games coincides with the industry’s American boom years in the Eighties, but most of the early games didn’t feature the stars that were chasing championships in real life. Many developers were content to use their own characters. Early games in the genre include arcade games like Tag Team Wrestling and Mat Mania, and computer games like Rock ‘N’ Wrestle and Championship Wrestling. These established the basic principles that most wrestling games would follow, offering full movement around the ring rather than limited 2D movement, and placed an early emphasis on the importance of bouts beyond standard one-on-one contests with their inclusion of tag-team matches. One console game stood out as a common introduction with our interviewees.
“The first one I ever owned, I believe, was the NES Pro Wrestling game, the one with Starman,” says ‘The Librarian’ Leva Bates, a wrestler who can currently be seen on All Elite Wrestling’s flagship show Dynamite, which airs on ITV4 on Friday nights. “I remember The Amazon – I
