We love strategy and role-playing games. Wrestling doesn’t fit our scope as much, but we’ve spent thousands of hours playing games like that.
I already consider myself a very cultured person. With my complex role-playing games, pretensions to good stories and all those mentally demanding strategy games, I’m something of a snob among game fans. You can skin yourselves in your brawlers and first-person shooters – meanwhile I sit gleefully in my chair and judge the lives of thousands with the click of a mouse.
Oh, I wish it were all true. But in fact, I’m already a little prone to mindless entertainment. Sure, I’m not into old-school role-playing games and strategy – but even there I’m occasionally tempted to just grind everything to bits as a barbarian or play mindless factions like the ogres in Total War: Warhammer 3.
But a look at my gaming history shows that I have a completely different Guilty Pleasure. For I have most likely spent over a thousand hours playing wrestling games. That is even a rather optimistic estimate.
But honestly – actually, my enjoyment of these games isn’t all that surprising. Because behind all the bluntness of bare skin, strong words and folding chairs, there’s more brain power than you’d think.
Table of Contents
The wrestling flytrap
Getting a kid excited about wrestling isn’t hard. All it takes is the fireworks and thinking that brilliant choreo is a real fight. That’s why, at the young age of ten, I too was fascinated by it all at times. But I didn’t really follow wrestling as a child. It was far too obscure when the shows were even broadcast in Germany.
At least I was familiar with the whole concept. I didn’t really fall into the trap of wrestling games until a little later. Fortunately, I was already old enough to understand that real fights are not played that way. A friend of mine had bought Smackdown vs Raw 2007 for the PlayStation 2. And since we played virtually everything together, I played along there too.
It was a revelation. Not because I liked the gameplay so much. Not because it’s fun to beat the crap out of other people with a sledgehammer. Not because I was fascinated by the power of the athletes. But rather: Because there was a character editor!
The Wrestling Flytrap
Getting a kid excited about wrestling isn’t hard. All it takes is the fireworks and thinking that brilliant choreo is a real fight. That’s why, at the young age of ten, I too was fascinated by it all at times. However, I didn’t really follow wrestling as a child.
At least I was familiar with the whole concept. I didn’t really fall into the trap of wrestling games until a little later. Fortunately, I was already old enough to understand that this is not how real fights are fought. A friend of mine had bought Smackdown vs Raw 2007 for the PlayStation 2. And since we played virtually everything together, I played along there too.
It was a revelation. Not because I liked the gameplay so much. Not because it’s fun to beat the crap out of other people with a sledgehammer. Not because I was fascinated by the power of the athletes. But rather: Because there was a character editor!
That was the main reason why my head suddenly suggested to me: “This … is the best game in the world!” I’ve always been excited about making up my own characters. That’s where this role-playing madness comes from. But it can also be applied to anything where I get to create detailed characters.
I promptly bought Smackdown vs Raw 2007 myself and created dozens of fighters. Each with their own gimmick and the character depth of a beer mat. Here was my rapper-wrestler who used only variations of the same move in every match. There was my submission master, who ran around like a ninja and forced every enemy to submit. I even had a Kane knock-off who was huge and still cheated constantly.
Suddenly I couldn’t get away from this series and wanted to know even more about everything related to it.
There’s more to it than that
It was the classic Rabbithole. A fascination with one facet turned into an enthusiasm for everything else. Of course, at some point I wanted to know more about the people who were constantly slamming my own characters to the mat. Among them were such dazzling figures as Rey Mysterio, the Undertaker, Batista and above all Eddie Guerrero, who had died shortly before.
It was the real tragedy surrounding Eddie that drew me further into this world. In the process, I learned more and more about all the dramatic stories that took place both inside and outside of the fiction surrounding the WWE. I was enthralled on the one hand by planned stories like the long-standing rivalry between The Rock and Steve Austin, but also by real-life drama like the legendary screwjob in which Brett Hart was unwittingly stripped of his title. And in a way, the morbid self-destruction that many stars of the sport fell victim to in very different ways.
The WWE in particular is often exemplary trash. Sometimes stories are told and scenes are shot that make me grab my head. An almost 80-year-old woman once gave birth to a hand during a show. No joke.
Objectively, wrestling is often pretty silly, but when it’s good, it’s outstanding. Especially since at some point I understood how the matches in particular work. What rules really apply in the background. It’s not that easy to get the audience excited about a match. For that, people have to be deceived who know that it’s all arranged.
This article is not enough for the complete fascination of wrestling. First of all, I just want to say that at some point I simply became a flawless wrestling fan. After a few years, the real wrestlers and the way a match is run and how storylines develop were much more important to me than my own banal tights.
And then the pastime really took off.
My parallel life
As I became more and more interested in how feuds work in real life and what actually makes a good match, I was eager to replicate it. The WWE games have always offered extremely many creative outlets. Be it a manager mode, a build-your-own-story mode or the later established Universe mode.
It was the Universe mode that took the most time out of my life. Here, it’s all about scheduling every show on the calendar. I am responsible for making sure that talents get exciting feuds. Even random turns can occur in the process. It never really worked reliably with the dynamic storylines, but I didn’t care because I had my own plans anyway.
At one point, I was almost living a parallel life where I planned out an entire fictional wrestling year. Parallel life because this planning accompanied me for a whole year. Always until the new part appeared.
In the process, I continued my own universe. I even kept a record of all my important shows. Simply so that I could remember who won when and how. And above all, which matches there had already been to see. I didn’t want to bore my audience. Here I could also put the spotlight on the talents who, in my opinion, could never shine as much as they deserved in reality.
The matches were then of course all played out. In most cases, I took on the person who would be a desirable winner. Sometimes, however, the game threw a spanner in the works and I had to reschedule. I also tried to make each match entertaining.
So I didn’t just play to win as effectively as possible. I tried to work with the same tricks as the professionals in reality. For example, in hot feuds, the escalation level was higher so that things got more violent. At least one table has to break. Sometimes I would just break off a pin if a win would come too soon at that point. That required a lot of game experience, planning and creativity for variety.
From that point of view, the WWE games often challenged me more mentally than many a strategy game. Right now I’m really getting in the mood to go through it again. Stupidly, WWE 2020 was an absolute disaster and I’m out of the wrestling routine for a while.
I’ve got itchy fingers, but again I probably can’t afford those thousands of hours of game time.
