If you remember reading WrestleRetro #3, you can recall that I used to be, at the tender age of nine, a foolish young lad who thought that World Championship Wrestling was real and the World Wrestling Federation was fake. It even spread over to video games, when I refused to play any WWF games for almost two years because I knew a WCW game was going to be that damn good. I was even more inspired because, in 1989, the first WCW game ever hit the Nintendo Entertainment System and blew away the WWF’s first game, WrestleMania. It was even better than the sequels (WWF WrestleMania Challenge [which was actually kind of okay], WWF WrestleMania Steel Cage Challenge, and WWF King of the Ring)!

Little did I know, as a youngster, that WCW’s first game was actually a port of a Japanese game, titled Superstar Pro Wrestling. At the time, Japanese wrestling was starting to splinter from the top two promotions, All Japan Pro Wrestling and New Japan Pro Wrestling, into smaller groups such as the Universal Wrestling Federation (later Union of Pro Wrestling Force International or UWF-I for short), Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling (FMW), Super World Sports (SWS, which eventually became WAR, which had two separate named for it’s acronym; the goofy-sounding Wrestle and Romance, as well as the cooler-by-comparison Wrestle Association R), and several more. This game captured Japanese wrestling at a very interesting time, and the roster was a virtual who’s who of who was on top at the time. Representing All Japan were Giant Baba, Andre the Giant (the huge, as well as unplayable, boss character of the game), Abdullah the Butcher, the Road Warriors, Jumbo Tsuruta, Stan Hansen, Genichiro Tenryu, and Bruiser Brody (who was left in the game after his death in 1988). New Japan was represented by Antonio Inoki, Riki Choshu, and Big Van Vader (who, amusingly, is portrayed in the game itself wearing his robot elephant mask). Akira Maeda is the only representative of the UWF.

The intro for WCW, as you can see, appeared a little tamer than the fearsome representations of SSPW’s characters. Look at how much different Hawk and Animal look when compared to the SSPW versions. It was also clear that the game was something of a rush job, as many of the characters were palette and head swaps. Ric Flair, for example, is given Giant Baba’s jumping neckbreaker as a finishing move instead of his figure four. Lex Luger’s "neck wringer" is Antonio Inoki’s Royal Octopus hold. Eddie Gilbert’s hotshot is non-existent in the game, instead replaced by Abdullah the Butcher’s Sudanese Meat Cleaver elbowdrop. Oddly enough, even Road Warrior Hawk was swapped, as his finisher in SSPW was a brainbuster, but since that was needed for Michael P.S. Hayes’ DDT, he was given Stan Hansen’s lariat to compensate. Fortunately, Sting and Riki Choshu shared moves, so he got to keep his Scorpion Deathlock. Also, oddly enough, everyone wears long tights with trunks over top, creating the lovely "underwear over pants" look that many wrestlers in the 1980s employed.

The control scheme is fairly easy to remember. The B button punches and the A button kicks, and, after wearing your opponent down with punches and kicks, he will drop to a knee and you can perform a grapple move on him by pressing a direction on the D-pad and pressing A. This is where WCW has a lot of replay factor to it; each wrestler has eight different grapple moves to choose from, but you can only assign four at the beginning of each bout, thus leading to variance for each match. Also, you have a power meter for each move you are about to perform, meaning that you can choose to perform a stronger move by holding the A button longer. If your opponent is on the mat and you are close enough to the turnbuckles, you can actually leap off the buckles onto your opponent with a flying kneedrop (B button) or a diving body press (A button).

There are two different modes to play in, singles match (where you must beat everyone else in the game twice before eventually facing the brutal WCW Master, who is a headswapped Andre the Giant since Andre was a WWF-affiliated wrestler at the time) or tag team match (where you pick two wrestlers and go into a round robin league to determine the top team). A combination of this, as well as the fact that the boss of singles mode is nearly unbeatable, leads to a pretty impressive replay value for such a simplistic game. Something else interesting is that matches can end on a submission, which was unheard of for the time, as well as a disqualification for standing on the top rope for more than five seconds. This made the experience a lot more realistic than your usual fare.

As you can probably tell, I am a big fan of this game. You have to remember that, in 1989, wrestling games (especially for the NES) were mostly punching and kicking with the occasional signature move if you were lucky. This game changed all of that, adding new depth to the wrestling genre. Unfortunately, people kept buying WWF games and this game went somewhat ignored, as did another great game in Tecmo World Wrestling. However, that hasn’t stopped me from getting my copy and totally enjoying it. If you have a NES and want a wrestling game that provides you with some challenge, this is probably a good bet. I’ve made the decision to stop giving grades to games, but this is a definite recommendation and a solid pickup, if you can find it on the cheap (perhaps, say, around $10).

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