In They Live, former WWF Intercontinental champ Rowdy Roddy Piper finds a pair of sunglasses
that allow him to see the dark truths hidden behind society’s flimsy facades.
Today, the glasses are this YouTube video, and the dark truth is that in the realm of
video games, everything is wrestling.
Just like They Live, this isn’t a violent takeover.
Wrestling has already won.
Yakuza, Dead Rising, Spider-Man, Kirby, Skyrim, Devil May Cry, Pokemon, Watch Dogs, Mad Max,
and even FINAL FANTASY have been infiltrated.
If you want to escape wrestling’s greasy grasp, you’ve gotta go play some seriously
dour, punishing stuff like Sekiro-oh.
Oh.
Wrestling shows up in places where it fits, and also places where you wouldn’t expect
to see it.
It’s the high fructose corn syrup of video games.
Whether you like it or not, you’re immersed in Pro Wrestling.
Today we’re gonna try to figure out how we got here.
So please, put on the glasses.
Look! They're everywhere!
When I was researching this video, I met wrestlers who owe their careers to video games, and
game developers who owe their careers to wrestling.
There’s some fundamental compatibility because wrestling and games are two artforms that
live and die by their CLARITY.
To understand what I mean, we need to go back to the beginning.
Bit further.
Keep going.
A bit too far.
Close enough.
Pro wrestling as we know it bubbled up from the carnival, an ultra-darwinist free-for-all
of entertainment where the best way to survive is to be bright and eye-catching and, most
of all, immediately understandable.
There can’t be a single moment where the audience has time to ask themselves
“what is going on and why do I care.”
Because in that split second, they’ll get up, and go click on another vid-
I mean walk to another tent.
Real, authentic wrestling wasn’t that good at holding people’s attention.
The matches took too long, and nobody got punched.
To untrained eyes in the upper bleachers, legitimate grapplers locked in battle was
just a visual mess.
A pile of hairy meat laying on the ground for a few hours.
But carnival promoters, known for their integrity and unwavering rectitude, refused to alter the rules.
I'm just kidding.
They started faking the fights.
Promoters incorporated theatrical elements and choreography.
The wrestlers made their motions simpler, bigger, more readable.
They introduced clarity.
Real wrestling morphed into live action cartoon fighting.
And that cartooniness extended to the stories and characters as well.
Heroes were homely everymen or humbly handsome.
Villains were snarling menaces, preening snobs, or sometimes, just not from around here.
Yeah.
Wrestling has a complicated and sad relationship with racism, homophobia and xenophobia.
Wrestling builds its characters with broad strokes and cultural shorthands, even when
those shorthands are really shitty.
That’s not unique to American wrestling; no matter where it goes, that reductive accessibility
is part of what makes it successful.
After World War II, It migrated to Japan where it got very, very popular
People would tune in every week to watch Rikidozan vanquish western invaders in the ring.
If we fast forward a few years from there, we get to the first wrestling games.
Wrestling was still a big deal in the 70s and 80s, as Japan started to become the juggernaut
of game development.
The first batch of wrestling games used stand-ins of the era’s greats and did their best to
recreate the in-ring competition.
But in the late ‘80s, something important happened.
The action and archetypes of wrestling tumbled out of the ring, and started to become
just a part of games.
1987’s Double Dragon is the first place I noticed wrestling moves in a non-wrestling game.
These big beefy dudes will pick you up and suplex you and hit you with a big crossbody.
It’s a small reference to the world of wrestling, but it’s important.
The Wrestler is a universal shorthand for someone who is bigger than you, stronger than you,
and thanks to their grappling skills, very dangerous to be close to.
Because arcade games are designed to be played sans tutorial, the skillset of enemies needs
to be telegraphed instantly.
Instead of creating that clarity of purpose…. they just borrow it from wrestling.
The wrestler-type baddy is an action game trope that lives on to this day.
It was the wise folks at Capcom who said,
"hey what if we also let the player pile drive some gormless fools onto the sidewalk?"
Mike Haggar was a playable grappler in 1989’s Final Fight.
In the lore, he was a retired pro wrestler who's using his lariats and suplexes to clean
up the streets.
The moves don’t fit the environment where they’re happening, but that’s part of the appeal.
I think it's the element of danger or you know, simulated danger.
That's, you know, I mean, that's the art of professional wrestling is making something
seem deadly or, you know, something that a normal person could not withstand
This is Excalibur, a retired wrestle r and current commentator for AEW.
He thinks wrestling can hit even harder when it happens where it doesn’t belong.
That's why it's so appealing is because it looks just
positively brutal.
And you know, but when you see it in the ring, you know, it's being performed kind of a safe
space, so to speak, and that that the wrestlers aren't going to be harmed any more than necessary
in the performance of the move.
But once you remove it from the confines of a professional wrestling ring, it seems to
be even more brutal, it kind of turn turns it up.
It’s just dang appealing to see someone do some professional athlete shit in the wrong context.
That’s why Reebok ran an entire ad campaign about Terry Tate, the office Linebacker.
He's a linebacker, in your office.
Over time, the need to provide a narrative justification for why these characters are
busting out wrestling stunts just kind of... went away.
Lil Leon Kennedy has never stepped foot in a wrestling ring, but he loves to suplex a zombie.
It doesn’t make logical sense, but it unquestionably belongs there....
...because wrestling and games grew up under similar circumstances.
Wrestling maneuvers, even when divorced from their in-ring context, are a perfect fix to
one of game development's greatest challenges, that old holy grail,
re-read-a-bility.
Whether it’s low res pixel art or 4K spectacle, game developers need to convey complex actions
on a screen that could be across the room or just 4 inches wide.
There needs to be a clarity of motion.
But that’s a problem that wrestlers have already solved.
For the benefit of the back row, wrestlers turn themselves into animated characters.
They move in a way that prioritizes anticipation, readability, and weight.
All things that game animators pay attention to — and incorporate into their own work.
It's over the top.
it's larger than life.
They're doing normal things, but the way that they present it to you, they're projecting
from the front row to the top of the arena.
Zach Lowery was the lead animator on Saints Row 3 & 4, and the games that have got some wrestling in them.
And as an animator, especially in games, you need to make sure that it's really clear what
the motion is, that someone if it's a multiplayer game, that someone can read the action that's
coming, and they can react to it.
So I think it's the, it's the magnification of reality.
“Magnifying reality” can make just about any action more readable.
To do that, wrestlers and animators can use a powerful tool.
And i’m Right about to tell you what it is.
Get ready.
ANTICIPATION
You know, one of the main principles of animation is anticipation.
You really want to set up the move before it happens.
And you can connect that to pro wrestling in so many different ways.
Whether it's just to a simple punch,
or Razor Ramon, throwing a guy between his legs
throwing his arms out,
and everybody knows, oh, here comes the razor's edge, right, and you're waiting, and you're waiting for it.
If you’re making a game, and you’re looking for a combat maneuver that’s satisfying
from up close or far away, sometimes you’ve just got to hop in a mocap suit and do some ddt's.
Which is exactly what Zach did.
There are wrestling games, there are non-wrestling games that borrow wrestling moves and archetypes,
and then there are games that, despite not being wrestling are wrestling.
Maybe you’ve heard of Suda Goichi.
He’s developed some iconic, weird games over the years, but the one thing they
all have one thing in common is Pro Wrestling.
When I asked Suda if he could ever make a game that didn’t involve pro wrestling,
he made this face.
* Suda furrows his brow and stares into the distance *
I guess you could say had I bit of a revelation on just now being asked this question.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that pro wrestling is my identity, per se.
But I feel it's sort of like a symbol of my work,
or maybe sort of like a trademark or a calling card.
Suda’s first contact with wrestling was in 1981 when he tuned in to watch the in-ring
debut of Tiger Mask, a manga character turned movie character turned real life human flesh wrestler.
Suda stayed a casual fan throughout his childhood.
After high school, I came out to Tokyo and started working.
I realized I'm in a place where I can go see these pro wrestling matches directly
and from that point on my interest in pro wrestling sort of kicked into higher gear.
I spent about 80% of my time thinking about pro wrestling.
Suda started hunting down all the wrestling he could find from around the world.
He leveraged that knowledge into his first big gig in the games industry,
writing for Fire Pro Wrestling 3—
which is one of the deepest and most finicky wrestling sims out there.
When Suda struck out with his own studio Grasshopper Manufacture, he started making new types of games,
but wrestling found its way into all of them.
Killer 7 had Mask de Smith, a luchador with a grenade launcher.
No More Heroes stars Travis Touchdown: an obnoxious otaku assassin
who also happens takes pro-wrestling correspondence courses.
In Michigan: Report from Hell, Suda came pretty close to making a wrestling-free survival
horror experience, but then he went and named all the characters after wrestlers.
Suda puts a whole lot of pro wrestling out into the gaming world, but he also loves to
see it pop up in other people’s work.
He’s got the glasses on and he likes what he sees.
When I’m playing a game and there's like a pro wrestler in the game
and they have some sort of pro wrestling motif
I sort of feel like, a strange kind of connection with the people who made the game.
I feel like “Oh, hey, you know, I'm a pro wrestling fan.
This guy's obviously pro wrestling fan, like, we're kind of buddies now.”
Wrestling gave games a helpful archetype, a host of readable moves,
and an opportunity for fans to say “hey I recognize that.”
But the love affair isn't one way, because games are also changing the landscape of
real, actual, fake wrestling.
*Excalibur getting the shit kicked out of him in the ring*
* record scratch *
Yep.
That’s Excalibur.
You’re probably wondering how he ended up in this situation.
It's through video games, funnily enough,
I was the co-webmaster or co webmaster of rasslin video games,
which is a video game website that covered wrestling video games specifically.
Through that website, he met Super Dragon, who invited him to live in his garage.
and learn the art of wrestling.
Excalibur went on to have an explosive career on the so-cal indie wrestling scene.
He co-founded Pro Wrestling Guerilla, a wrestling promotion that’s mostly known for rapid-fire,
shockingly athletic bouts.
Traditional, American wrestling moves at a more methodical, plodding pace.
PWG looks like a Tekken tournament if everybody picked King.
The generation of wrestlers who came up through PWG grew up playing games, and a lot of them
integrate it into their in ring styles and characters.
Just like Suda-san and other game devs draw inspiration from wrestling, Wrestlers are drawing from games.
Kenny Omega, seen here wrestling in front of 43,000 people at the Tokyo Dome,
named himself after the Omega Weapon, an optional superboss from the Final Fantasy series.
He’s borrowed moves from gaming’s greats.
And here he is dressed as Sans Undertale.
On television.
On purpose.
Leva Bates has made a career out of cosplaying in-ring,
wrestlers like Sunbuster and Player Uno have literally
"PAUSED" wrestling matches to catch a break.
WWE star and KNOWN GAMER Xavier Woods is working with Riot games to do game stuff.
Then there’s Kaiju Big Battel, whose monster fighting can be an overwhelming visual spectacle.
They’ve given up the old school clarity of wrestling’s good guys and bad guys.
So to add that clarity back in, they leverage your auditory nostalgia,
blasting video game classics over the PA system.
I don’t know if I’m supposed to cheer for the freaky bird or the burger-man,
but if they play Bowser’s castle theme when the Bird appears, that helps clear things up.
So games love wrestling, and wrestling loves games.
Maybe it’s not an invasion.
Maybe it’s a symbiotic relationship.
The feeling is definitely there.
Ohhhh!
They *were* big into video games tonight!
It’s a new morning in Gaming.
What it really comes down to is our ability to accept--
that everything is wrestling.
OH YEAH!