Wrestling games have been a part of gaming since the 8 bit days, and while the games were not always the best, they did have great entries over the years, such as Wrestlefest for the arcade, and WWF No Mercy for the Nintendo 64. One other game that deserves to be mentioned more though, is WWF Wrestlemania The Arcade Game, one of the all time classics. What made this game special however, was that it was not just a wrestling game, bit also had many aspects of a traditional fighting game. It helps in this regard, that the game was itself inspired by Mortal Kombat.
Yes, a wrestling game was inspired by Mortal Kombat, and for good reason as well. WrestleMania The Arcade Game was designed by Midway ,although by a different team than the Mortal Kombat Team. The game went for the digitized graphics look and played far more like a fighting game than a wrestling game. In some ways, this can be thought of as a western version of Saturday Night Slam Masters, with a Mortal Kombat flavor compared Slam Master’s Street Fighter. Each wrestler had unique moves, and the Undertaker even had a fatality move to finish off opponents, with other fatalities planned but abandoned due to time constraints.
The game had commentary by Jerry Lawler and Vince McMahon with their voices digitized into the game, although they reused some lines from the NBA Jam games as well. in the scripts The game was extremely over the top and less realistic than previous games, such as Razor Ramon having a transforming blade arm and powerful uppercuts that knock the opponent into the sky. This was the merging of wrestling and fighting games at their absolute best and is something that has not been matched since.
There were ,many ports of this game, but most lacked something. There were no pallete Swaps, endings or other secrets, as the home ports were being developed at the same time as the arcade version as some of these additions were implemented after work was already done on the home ports. The SNES port was missing characters, the Genesis/Megadrive port reduced visuals, and even the PlayStation version was a bit off.
I would love to see a proper re-release of the arcade game on modern systems if something could be worked out licensing wise. This was amazing in the arcades, and it is that version people should be able to once again experience for themselves.
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