From 1996 to mid-1998, Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) was the preeminent sports entertainment company in North America. For this brief period, WCW surpassed even Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now known as WWE), which had to that point been to pro wrestling what Kleenex is to tissue paper. The Atlanta-based WCW proved that its southern-inflected style of wrestling could hold its own on a national and even worldwide stage, and for a two year period, its flagship program Nitro outpaced WWF’s Monday Night Raw in ratings. Curiously enough, WCW’s success was largely predicated on WWF aesthetic elements. For instance, the NWO, a dissenting faction within WCW around which a number of ratings-friendly storylines developed, consisted for the most part of ex-WWF stars. These included Scott Hall (nee Razor Ramon), Kevin Nash (nee Diesel), and, most extraordinarily, an evil version of Hulk Hogan, the man who had, in his benevolent 80s iteration, defined the WWF. All of these personages assumed characters identical or in counterpoint to their WWF iterations, and WCW reaped the profits, as many fans naively thought, at least for a time, that the WWF was legitimately invading WCW.
But despite these liberal appropriations, WCW still had its own unique aesthetic, and it is in part for this reason that WCW video games from 1997 and 1998 also rated better than those of the WWF. WWF released the multiplatform offerings Raw is War (1998) and Attitude (1999) through license-loving publisher Acclaim, with gameplay based on button commands resembling those of versus fighters. Down-forwarding did little to capture the ebb and flow of the grappling and counter-grappling around which pro wrestling is structured, and while Acclaim’s WWF games had good graphics, they played choppily. WCW, by contrast, borrowed its engine from AKI’s Virtual Pro Wrestling 64, one of the premiere wrestling games from Japan. This system, based on weak and strong grapples, captured the balletic fluidity of professional wrestling, and made for a game that was highly playable, even for the wrestling non-enthusiast. The first game to fully utilize this engine stateside, 1997’s WCW vs. NWO World Tour for the N64, played exquisitely, though it suffered from blocky, clip-happy graphics and an overly Japanese feel. Many of the characters were renamed wrestlers from Japanese promotions like FMW. This was a boon for the hard-core puroresu fan (who could now see FMW legend Hayabusa take on Sting), though it came at the expense of the WCW characters, who also feel like reskins of Japanese guys, with inauthentic looks and move-sets. Chris Benoit, for instance, comes off as a generic jobber. Ric Flair looks less like the Nature Boy we know and love and more like Donald Trump in a Speedo. Scott Hall’s trademark Outsider’s Edge, meanwhile, finishes in a sit-out pin, which wrestling fans will recognize immediately as anathema. WCW/NWO Revenge, its 1998 sequel, rectified these issues, depicting the WCW aesthetic in fine form.
WCW/NWO Revenge embodies everything WCW was at its peak. On account of having deep-pocketed Ted Turner as its owner, WCW didn’t have to spare any expenses on its confines, and so its sets were expansive, colorful and multifarious in a way that the relatively claustrophobic WWF environs were not. Available from the outset in Revenge is the galvanized metal set from Monday Nitro, as well as the sets from WCW’s themed pay-per-views. These include the summery Bash at the Beach set, complete with a wharf-like boardwalk leading to the ring, and the October staple Halloween Havoc, with its eerie green aura and headstones at the top of the entryway. Along with these sets, you also get over-elaborate costumes to match. While late 80s and early 90s WWF set the bar for outlandish gimmick characters, WCW took this even farther all throughout the duration of the 90s. Thus, Revenge contains the pinnacle (or perhaps the nadir) of these experiments—namely Glacier and Mortis, part of an attempt on WCW’s part to facsimile the Mortal Kombat vibe and transfer it to a WCW ring. Glacier, a purported martial arts expert, is basically an unmasked Sub-Zero who looks not unlike Vanilla Ice, and Mortis, meanwhile, is a zombie-styled striker with a skull mask of near-Tom Savini quality. To fit with this fighting game feel, Revenge adds a combo system whereby certain grapple commands initiate an opportunity to chain together strikes, a feature which would appear in the Japanese release Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 but would not carry forward to future American AKI wrestling games.
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La Parka vs. Mortis: WCW loved its skeleton men.
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Beyond these superficialities, you also get an expansive roster of WCW and NWO talent, which remains the most enduring appeal of this game. This lineup includes both iterations of the NWO, the Hogan-led black-and-white and the Nash-led red-and-black (a.k.a. the Wolfpac). You also get WCW’s truly original success stories, most notably the singular Goldberg, known for his inordinately long unbeaten streak which led him to the WCW World Title and, at the time of the game’s release, was still two months from its end. As could be expected, he’s virtually unbeatable in this game. WCW was also unique in its championing of cruiserweight talent, providing ample TV time to showcase Mexican, Japanese and American light heavyweights. Luchadores like Rey Mysterio, Psychosis, Juventud Guerrera, and the chair-wielding, skeleton-masked La Parka are all on the cartridge, allowing the retro gamer to revisit these fast-paced, acrobatic matches that set apart WCW’s skill-based pro wrestling from WWF’s story-based sports entertainment. Among other WCW-built superstars available in the game are the incomparable Sting (in face-paint styled after Brandon Lee in The Crow) and the lovable yogi-to-be Diamond Dallas Page (along with his valet/yogini Kimberly).
The laundry-list of talent doesn’t end there. If an appearance in an AKI wrestling games is taken as the standard of millennial-era wrestling celebrity, then there are more than a few who make their only such appearance Revenge. These include beloved multi-time WCW champion Booker T and his Harlem Heat tag partner/brother Stevie Ray, grungy former ECW champion Raven and his "Flock" of gothic tagalongs, 80s WWF mainstay motor-mouth Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Canadian legend Bret Hart. You even get classically insipid gimmick characters like the Disco Inferno. For many of these legends (or legendary flops), Revenge represents their most playable video game rendering. Undeniably, WCW had loads of talent, and though its booking staff may have under-utilized many of the above names, Revenge offers gamers the opportunity to match them up in dream bouts WCW’s bookers apparently never could have imagined.
Ultimately, massive mismanagement proved to be the demise of WCW. As WWF grew more compelling with McMahon intensifying his futile assaults on the irrepressible Steve Austin, WCW became more madcap and aimless, and lost much of its talent base to its rival. Eventually, even AKI switched over to the WWF, and soon it was WWF talent benefitting from that fluid, grapple-based engine. EA quickly swooped up the WCW license, only to make the abysmal WCW Mayhem and its nigh unplayable sequel WCW Backstage Assault. Could this have been another factor in WCW’s demise? Truth be told, more than a few gamers were drawn to WWF and WCW through the games, and became wrestling fans on that account. That WWF had the pick-up-and-play AKI grappling system at the core of WWF Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF No Mercy may very well have facilitated a smooth transition into wrestling fandom for some. Either way, by the start of 2001, wrestling fans had sided with the WWF, and had tuned out WCW. In March of 2001, WCW folded, bought out by none other than Vince McMahon.
In its interactive capacity, a video game is, to some extent, a text that is never finished. WCW Revenge, then, stands as a living record of World Championship Wrestling. The game epitomizes a crucial historical moment in a promotion that was soon to die out. In that sense, this game is an artifact of a lost institution, an enduring landmark of a unique professional wrestling micro-culture. Unlike, say, a text from an ancient civilization, we can actually interact with this record—even alter it, in fact, and update it, to some extent, given the costume and name editor—at least in the realm of play. If nothing else, WCW was a lot of possibilities, many of which didn’t go anywhere. Revenge retains these possibilities for posterity, and so is chock-full of what-ifs which you can realize every time you fire up the game. For this reason, your correspondent recommends you pick up a copy of WCW Revenge if you haven’t already. And if you already do own a copy, pick up a second. On one cartridge, update the names and costumes; on the other, keep the names and costumes at their default setting. This way, you can enjoy WCW for everything it was at its pinnacle, and also for everything its many mainstays became.