Pro Wrestling was a game Nintendo made for the NES. It was a wrestling game (obviously) and was surprisingly a lot of fun. Unique fun characters. a sense of humor and a general charm about it, it was something that stood out in the early days of the NES. Lately I have been thinking that with WWE games not coming to Nintendo systems lately, the arrival of the Switch seems to be a great chance for Nintendo to revive this game.
Wrestling games have a lot of appeal but WWE games taking up most of the genre, at Least in North America. In Japan there is more variety, but those games never get released here. I feel there is room for new games that offer something different to the player. To give an example of what I mean, the Ultimate Muscle game on the GameCube was a fantastic anime wrestling game based on a fantastic anime about wrestling, and I feel that is the perfect style for a reboot. NES Pro Wrestling just felt like an Anime game with its characters and setting , so giving the game a complete anime feel would be very fitting. Of course, a new title is needed, since pro Wrestling is too generic a title. The title should reflect some sort of zaniness, since this would be more cartoonish than say a WWE game ( I really keep going back to that don’t I). The original characters from the NES game were great and if paired with some new ones that are even more creative, this would be a great cast. Nintendo is great at creating wacky characters, for example Starman from the NES game, so creating some new ones for a wrestling game is right up Nintendo’s alley.
The Switch is being designed as a multiplayer system, and wrestling games are the ideal multiplayer games. A wrestling game made for the Switch just sounds like a match made in heaven, and Nintendo already has the perfect developer to make this. Next Level Games has shown they can create action games and cartoonish games ( and cartoonish sports action games), but at one point they proposed a games that was a Mario game that involved wrestling. It went against Nintendo’s vision for Mario, but for a Pro Wrestling reboot, it sounds like a good fit. This could be a good way to give Nintendo a genre their systems have become sadly deprived of, and at the same time, keep their unique Nintendo feel in with it.