The 5 Best Old School Wrestling Video Games…Period
By Matt Perri
Like most kids my age, I fell in love with video games. I loved the aura, the mystique, the sights, the sounds, and the hours spent trying to conquer a challenge that was, more often than not, designed so that you couldn’t conquer it.
You shot at endless Centipedes, jumped several barrels thrown by Donkey Kong, and navigated a bunch of mazes for the sole purpose of beating the top guy’s high score.
Back in the early 80’s, we weren’t fighting dragons or other monstrosities to get to the end of a game so we could get a little Princess action. That wasn’t until the big video game boom when games has a beginning, a middle and an end.
These days, I’m older and wiser but I still love my video games. I used to dream of the day I’d have my game room with old arcade cabinets and pinball machines and neon illuminating brick and oak with a jukebox playing some good music to go with good times.
I don’t quite have that, but I do have a nice, big HDTV with a PC with lots of games — including emulators with all my favorite games. I’m still a fiend for Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede and I play them with the MAME Emulator, but I love the more complicated, competitive stuff.
Specifically, sports games. I’m a huge Bay Area sports fan (Giants, Sharks, and 49ers are my teams) who grew up playing R.B.I. Baseball, Tecmo Bowl and Baseball Simulator on the NES (in fact, I’m pretty sure the guys who built AT&T Park got the idea of a ball splashing into San Francisco Bay from Baseball Simulator for the NES) as well as Madden and the mediocre NHL series on SNES.
The wrestling games, however, didn’t really get good until the early 1990’s…
No matter how good they got in the early days, I’d dream of games based exactly what I saw when I tuned into Primetime Wrestling or a WWF Pay-Per-View: managers who helped their guys cheat, full rosters, entrance music, a whole feud system. We’d get that eventually with games like the WWE 2K series.
But, until that time, these were the wrestling games that got my attention…