The Wrestling Game of the Future

Which Ironically Contains a Lot of Slam Masters

Part One of a series I’ll be crossposting between The Greatest Podcast in the History of Our Sport.

To say that wrestling games are an enthusiast genre is putting it mildly. The reason for this is simple- since almost its inception, it’s been one dominated by BRANDS and now, more specifically, it’s dominated by a BRAND and its one series of questionable quality. The musky dominance of an oversexed elderly muscleman’s glitzy promotion has all but consumed all space for wrestling on national television in the US and Canada, and similarly, its yearly entry has all but effectively become the development for the genre. This is particularly a shame, as the team behind these games has been neglectful of its long suffering engine and even inconsistent in even getting the roster to actually look like the actual people they’re representing.

OhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHH MY GOD, RADIO. WHAT HAPPENED? TELL ME HOW MANY FINGERS I'M HOLDING UP.

But more to the point, this series, Smackdown vs Raw, is one operating on an idea that is not only outdated, but one that’s supremely scared money. In fact, it’s money so scared, it’s still insistent on keeping kayfabe- if you’re reading this from HUMAN?, kayfabe is wrestling lingo for basically being in-character and (not necessarily, but whatever) on-script. See, back when the wrestling videogame was born, that wrestling was a work- a predetermined contest with possible pre-planned storylines intersecting -was not necessarily something the promoters were good with being loose in the wild. Now, the idea that everyone thought wrestling was real back then is patently false, because Jesus Christ, between the Bushwhackers and the Black Scorpion, come on.

Thing is, believability isn’t really a thing that wrestling does well. Now, sure, when Katsuyori Shibata peels off the ropes and drives his toes into a seated man’s chest like the future of humanity rests on him making pectorals into pulled pork, you believe it hurt. 

Ow.

You believe it, because it did hurt, because he actually did kick him in the chest that hard. Thing is, we want to believe it’s real, because that was brutal as shit, but we know that it’s not real-real, because we grew up watching Duke “The Dumpster” Droese on Superstars, which is very ironic in retrospect. 

The point is, professional wrestling isn’t based around believability, it’s about making people want to believe. It does this by being compelling, which people who think they’re oh-so-clever by reminding people that wrestling is fake would tell you is ridiculous. Fakeness disgusts them, which is why people like that only watch documentaries like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. What makes wrestling compelling is variable and fickle, requiring mindful observation of what the audience wants, listening, and not giving them what they want in a manner that excites and entertains. This really shouldn’t be as hard as it has proven for some promoters over the years, but Vince McMahon likes what he likes, and you’ll like it too, or it will be nothing but 20 minute promos about his ass until you start cheering again, dammit.

I’m on a tangent.

What I’m getting at is that there will forever be a place in games for the wrestling simulation, one that attempts to apply the rules of professional wrestling (they exist, and moreover, a lot of games ignore them!) onto some fudged model of real-superhuman-demigod-whatever strength and stamina in an attempt at making a worked sport into a legit one. But that wrestling games have to be some sort of attempt at making wrestling into a sport is old thinking, a product of a time when wrestling needed to be real enough to compel marks to pay to see it for themselves up close at a live show, which is where the money in wrestling was before online subscriptions and pay-per-view. This is not where we are right now. Where we are right now is three men of varying degrees of largeness dressed as Saiyan warriors tipping themselves out of a giant cereal box for an entrance. Where we are right now is a cosplay queen champion who, in her native Japan, came to the ring to the final boss theme from Okami. Where we are right now is an industry where the hottest blue chip player currently is a dude whose finisher is called the One-Winged Angel, who also hadokens people into the corner.

Kenny Omega is the nerd you nerds wish you could be.

The future of wrestling games lies not in being the next No Mercy or Fire Pro; it lies in being the next Saturday Night Slam Masters.

Because of course there would be great power still to be found with the Mighty Mayor of Earth, Mike Haggar.

The Premise: High Speed, Low Drag

The concept, basically put, is one you may be familiar with.

Simulated wrestling is three dimensional, a game that represents both the full space of a squared circle, as well as the immediate outside of the ring, possibly the entrance ramp and beyond as well. Simulated wrestling is highly detailed, featuring faceted movelists of a performer’s entire repertoire, including moves they haven’t done in a while, moves they haven’t done for an entire gimmick or two ago and moves they did maybe once or twice back before they decided they weren’t working out. Simulated wrestling is strategic to an anatomical scale, allowing you to work over parts of an opponent’s body, a classic element of professional wrestling.

These are all really excellent elements, the moving parts of a rich play experience, great when executed well. Thing is, it’s just one experience, and one that doesn’t particularly play to the larger than life experience of pro wrestling. Ironically, in the medium where everything else gets more explosive and more kinetic, wrestling feels at its most contained and mortal, because of all of these heavy details. This is not helped in particularly bad cases of the genre, where the controls are tend to be heavy, imprecise and unresponsive. But even in good cases, there’s the weight of realism laying on most wrestling games, and it’s one that ironically isn’t there in the genuine article. To this day, I have yet to hear a wrestling game have a ring impact noise that even comes close to how good it can sound on TV, let alone in person.

The counterpoint to this digital kayfabe enforcement ironically lies in a very pro wrestling approach. Chris Jericho, a man who has made a career out of reinventing himself, says that what worked best for him was to take some genuine aspect of yourself, and embody it, in the paraphrased words from This is Spinal Tap, “up to 11.” This is why throughout his storied and decorated career, the amazing characters Jericho has portrayed can effectively be boiled down to “Chris the Arrogant Fuckwit,” “Chris the Paranoid Wreck,” “Chris the Goddamned Rockstar” and “Chris the Misanthropic Ninny,” among others. Now, I can point to a ton of games that can claim they’re attempting to be Wrestling the Sport: The Videogame. But Wrestling: The Videogame? How do we get to something like that?

From that time when "arcade money" was a thing that you could make.

1993. Pearl Jam. Hulk Hogan fucking over Bret Hart in a parking lot. SLAM MASTERS. Saturday Night Slam Masters, known in Japan by the monumental, cosmically fantastic name of MUSCLE BOMBER: THE BODY EXPLOSION, was an odd duck. Put together by Capcom as being a part of the same shared universe as Street Fighter, Final Fight and Rival Schools, and with character designs by Fist of the North Star artist Tetsuo Hara, Slam Masters is neither a fighting game nor a wrestling game, but a frantic, mashy hybrid of the two. It’s not what you’d call a lost classic by any terms, but it’s a good game, in the sense that it was a fun experience that did what it was meant to do, eat quarters.

The Good Stuff.

Thing is, it also did a thing that not a lot of wrestling games are actually willing to commit to: it played with the formula of wrestling and from that, created something that was a bit more unique. It was faster, for one, with not only movement around the ring being quick and smooth, but also with the ability to leap more like a Street Fighter character would than a wrestler. It was also less concerned with the minutia of deep movelists or the myriad of angles of attack wrestlers have devised over the years, instead favoring chunky strikes with big hitboxes and a few choice grappling attacks, including Haggar’s famous piledriver. And it was over the top, with wild characters that also got their own entrances and themes, bombastic sound and music, screen-shaking impacts- a wrestling game that exaggerates physical competition, who would have thought?

It also gave us Vader, as drawn by Hara, the artist who also designed Mr. Heart, who Vader portrayed an ersatz version of in the godawful live action Fist of the North Star movie. Sort of a weird circular thing to think about. Vader Time was the only good part of that movie, and it lasted like 30 seconds.

[FURIOUS AMOUNTS OF VADER TIME OCCURRING WITH HEAVY DISTORTION]

What I’m getting at here is that Slam Masters, as well as the similar-with-own-embellishments (and also quite good!) 3 Count Bout, dared to play with wrestling, both in terms of formula and presentation. For as much as they committed to the attempt, they succeeded, creating games that you would probably put second and third quarter into, even if you were just killing time and not actually officially At The Arcade. 

Featuring A Man Who Is Clearly Not Keiji Mutoh.

They attracted the eye at a distance, were easy to pick up and play, and they had that satisfying feedback that comes with a well realized arcade game, the good feeling that comes from doing an input and having it come back in impactful output. They didn’t need statistics or localized body damage, they didn’t need big movelists or even a roster in the double digits, they just needed to make the ground shake when the piledriver hits from a 12 foot vertical leap. They did it, and that’s why they’re still fun to mess with to this day.

I AGREE.

Now it’s time for wrestling games with this kind of priorities to make their return. Stripped down, at places down to the bare metal, so that they can fly instead of roll, with a further integration of the rapid-fire-mathematic-thoughts-that-kill fighting game gameplay to make it hot. Simulators can stay in the simulation game; we’re here to make a game where the pyro doesn’t come out during the entrance, it comes out when you input a dragon punch.

The New Ring: The Z-Axis Lost and Had to Leave Town

YOU WEREN'T BIG ENOUGH TO MAKE IT IN NEW YORK, THIRD DIMENSION.

Of the many god-like powers of the game developer is the ability to control the shape of a created reality. From this, we know for certain that the ability to move in three dimensions is not really much of a requirement for fun gamified combat. This is why we still have 2D fighting games after Virtua Fighter happened- you’d be amazed by how much adding or removing a physical dimension of space changes things!

In that spirit, I submit: abolish the third dimension from professional wrestling. At least, for our purposes.

Wrestling happens in a ring for the same reasons beds are wider than your body- the human body is prone to movement, which makes it prone to falling off of things even despite its owner’s wishes or self-preservation instinct. Wrestling rings can actually take a lot of different shapes- 4-side, 6-side, occasional octagons, all in varying dimensions. The shape doesn’t matter, because the ring is mostly there give the combatants room to move around and define a legal area for pins to occur. We’re in a videogame, so we don’t need any of that, so let’s just keep things simple and make movement a 2D plane. Doing this gets us several advantages:

• Players don’t have to line up on the same depth plane in order for strikes and grapples to connect flush. This makes ranging attacks much simpler, and thus with a far greater twitch-potential- you’re either in or out of reach, one or the other, and never off-plane or off-axis.
• 2D movement eliminates being able to sidestep around your opponent, but adds jumping on upward stick tilts and crouching on downward tilts. This gives the game attacks with crouching and jumping properties like what you’d get in a 2D fighter. While you might not get the ability to sidestep and skate out of the reach of grapples like you would if you had typical 3D movement, we can simulate this elsewhere- trust, I’ll get to that.
• This also makes double-tap inputs more distinct, which in turn allows us to bring in a dash mechanic similar to what you’d find in a modern 2D fighter. This may seem like trying to crowbar in fighting game mechanics into the wrestling formula, but backward and forward surges of movement, falling back and shooting in is a natural fit, because you see it in pro wrestling spots and exchanges. Such a dash could also be used as a side switch- dash into your opponent to circle around to their back like you would if you could sidestep.
• Lastly, this allows for fighting game directional inputs, quarter and half-circles, dragon punch motions and 360s. This brings in an element that’s been missing from a lot of even the best wrestling games- moves that can be launched and hit from outside of a grapple. Now, instead of having to hard grapple into a Diamond Cutter and watch as your representation of Diamond Dallas Page do something significantly less spectacular than the genuine article from a proper gentleman’s collar-and-elbow tieup, you can input half-circle forward plus grapple to have your character leap forward, latch onto their opponent’s head and deliver the DIAMOND CUTTER (HE NEVER SAW IT COMING!!) like it was supposed to be delivered. You can also use such inputs for powerful strikes and utility moves- who likes Flash Chops and Green Hands?

What do we lose? Actually, not a lot. Spread a 4 sided ring across a 2D plane, you’re still left with ropes to run or shoot your opponent into and turnbuckles to leap off of. It’s just that there’s only two sets instead of four, one behind you, one to your front. True, you can’t really go corner to corner, except that you can, just animate moves that simulate the likeness of going Bimmy to Jimmy. I’d even say that not only you can do rope breaks on pins and submissions, it adds a drawback to cornering gameplay, as if you have characters with strong corner game, it makes it so they still have to strive for the pin in the center of the ring, or otherwise risk having their work broken up by an easy pin escape.

(Non-wrestling readers: in professional wrestling, a “rope break” is a rule where, if you can put your hand on or beneath the ring ropes, the pin or submission hold you’re in is invalidated and the ref will stop counting it; your opponent has to release after a count of five or else be disqualified.)

Simple Controls and Moves with Purpose: Three-Handled Moss-Covered Family Grudunzel

THE SKY'S THE LIMIT WITH HIGHLY SPECIFIED CONTROL SCHEMA AND CHARACTER FOCUS, YEAH.

Press the shoulder button to store your finisher. Or maybe just fuck off, instead? There’s no need for a wrestling game to have complex controls- Fire Pro is one of the best damn wrestling series ever, and it uses like, five buttons and a directional? One of the worst wrestling games I’ve ever played is WCW Superbrawl, and as poor and bizarre as it could be, even it realized that the sum of its controlled elements could be put on just four buttons and the d-pad. For this Future Wrestling Game, we don’t want the fidelity that comes from having an enormous number of functions across the entire controller. What we want is something that could be played with an arcade-style input, buttons drilled into a board.

The reason for this is because we’re not shooting for something that’s a simulator, but rather something that blends in elements of the simulator’s play with the fast and focused aspects of a fighting game. The 2D playfield assists with this, but in a typical wrestling game, wrestlers either move like workers pacing themselves or athletes that need to pace themselves, at the risk of gassing out at an inopportune time. This is not something our game is concerned with, seeing as we’re putting in FG-style dash mechanics (among other things, but first things first). What I’m getting at here is, this is a game best played with the face buttons for ease of control, so let’s commit to a 4 button layout.

So, buttons. Possibly more than any type of game does the word ‘buttons’ carry more weight than in fighting games, and that sounds ridiculous, but consider the nature of what fighting games are and what they’re controlling- a cast of characters, each different and possibly wildly so, each with their own properties, special abilities and mechanics. That a positive quality a fighting game character can have is “has good buttons” isn’t just some dumbing down of deeper mechanics; it literally means that some characters are so good at specific things, they can win off one or two buttons in conjunctions with stick inputs, timed and executed properly- the Things This Character Does Well, simulated with basic human-to-device I/O.

So then what do wrestlers do? They move around, and for that, we have an analogue (or eight way directional) stick, specifically one freed up from that pesky third dimension, so we can wring all sorts of jumping and crouching and dashing and running from that. That’s one directional input, and we don’t need another. Wrestlers also kick and punch, so much so that when wrestlers are criticized as being bland strikers without much else going on, they’re described as “kicky-punchy.” That distinction can help when determining inputs for command and special attacks- there’s a lot of attacks with the hands and the feet that aren’t punches and kicks, but can map to those buttons all the same- a character with a knee lift can do a dragon punch motion (forward, down, down-forward on the stick or d-pad for those who don’t play fighters) with kick to launch up into their strike, while a character with a rolling elbow can have it mapped to quarter circle forward and punch.

Wrestlers also grapple, which is also known in some circles as “wrestling.” In grappling, we have an element from the traditional wrestling game we want to preserve. This isn’t because we’re leashing ourselves to the formula because we have no ideas of what could go in the place, but rather because professional wrestlers really do walk up to each other and start grapplin’ as part of matches. They go up, clasp each other in varying ways, and then attempt to USE WRESTLING TECHNIQUES on one another, in the manner of a sporting contest. Because that’s what’s wrestling is supposed to be at the end of the day, a competition between athletes. A formalized and reserved button for grappling is a natural, one button to lean into your opponent with a proper collar-and-elbow. From there, each character could have individual moves launched from grapples assigned to face buttons, and specifically moves that look the best launched from a formalized grapple- suplexes, piledrivers, powerbombs. You could also have the ability to shoot your opponent into the ropes with a double tap left or right from a grapple. In addition, a formalized grapple button, used within an actual grapple, could be used to perform either a more typical Greco-Roman standing switch, or the less physically intense Pro Wrestling go-behind grapple, the name of which should tell you how it’s used to position yourself vis-a-vis your opponent. What’s the point of this? Consider- if we’re making a 4 button wrestling game, and we reserve one button for grapples and go-behinds, we have 3 buttons left to map to different grappling attacks. But, if we then add in a different set of grappling attacks from a rear grapple position, you then have a possible of 6 moves. Not saying that we actually even need that many for our intents, but with distinct front and back grapple movesets, we have more possibilities and more room to build with our cast of characters- we’re still going for a snug fit, but it’s nice to have a little extra space to work with, right?

Lastly, wrestlers counter and reverse each other. They counter strikes by dropping their opponents into submission holds, they reverse grapples by hip tossing their opponent off them, they reverse attempted counters by rolling through into an armdrag, a move as ubiquitous as it is handy at giving a wrestler an excuse to do a flip in the ring. The idea of a button dedicated simply for having at the ready for context-based defending and countering isn’t new- the Arkham games made it a feature worth putting on the back of the box, while Dead or Alive had a similar but more complex system up and running years before that. So rather than having any sort of dedicated block button, we’ll instead have a dedicated counter button, one that does different things based on context. Hitting it puts your character into an open stance- any strike or grapple hitboxes that intersect with the stance’s are countered according to the character, as different wrestlers counter and reverse in different ways. You could even use it as a means to counter a dash-in, as a character dashing into a counter stance would be reversed by being shot into the ropes- in lucha libre, that’s called a bepaso. So even more wrestling cred.

So punch, kick, grapple, counter- we’ve got our four buttons for our four button hybrid wrestling-fighter. With that in mind, we’re free to start putting together movesets for our roster. Thing is, we aren’t going big and comprehensive with the moves for our characters, we’re going lean and mean, bringing in fighting game influences. Movelists in wrestling games are as much about conveying character as they are about beating up the opposition, so in the context of simulating the actual act of professional wrestling, being able to do a little bit of everything and having the b-sides available isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What we want is something a bit more purposeful than that, something with gameplay, moves that synergize with each other so that each character begins representing a different but viable gameplan. We want to have characters that have strike attacks that are particularly good, uncommonly powerful or quick or screen-covering. We want some characters who get explosive damage in bursts off their special moves, capable of launching or ground-bouncing into extended attack sequences. We want some characters who simply dominate in grapples, who are either skilled technicians that can hold on tighter or escape more easily, or big ol’ brutes who mostly just powerbomb the hell from people. We want all of these, and more, because this is where the spark of character interactions and matchups come from- how individual abilities measure up against each other in interesting and unexpected ways.

Next Time:

Heat, as a character resource? And yes, we can go to the outside, and we’ll figure out how to not make it suck like it tends to in real wrestling.