Wrestling plus Mortal Kombat equals WWF WrestleMania the Arcade Game! Of all the classic wrestling games that need a revival, it’s not No Mercy, and it’s not Wrestlefest. It’s WrestleMania Arcade! This game is bonkers and sees you take part in fast paced arcade action where you can pull off special moves like you would in Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, but it’s a wrestling game.
It’s time to look at what is definitely a nominee for my favourite wrestling game of all time. Let’s dive into WWF Wrestlemania The Arcade Game!
WrestleMania the Arcade game, changed up everything pro wrestling fans thought they knew to expect from a wrestling video game. Matches were fast paced, you could pull off moves and do things that weren’t possible in an actual wrestling match, and there were next to no rules. Some may think that this took things too far away from wrestling, but there was just so much I loved about this game, that it’s still on of my favourite WWE games to this day.
Featuring a select roster of eight WWE Superstars, the game may feel a little lacking compared to wrestling games these days, but it meant that you could really learn and build a connection to all the playable wrestles featured. In the game there is Bret Hitman Hart, The Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, Bam Bam Bigelow, Yokozuna, Lex Luger, the Bad Guy Razor Ramon and Doink the Clown. All of them were really unique superstars with unique personalities that led to very different moves that leant itself to the Mortal Kombat like presentation.
If you were a kid in the mid-90s and you saw this in the arcade, it was unlike any wrestling game you’d ever seen before!
The first few years of wrestling video games were all fairly bland. The graphics were often blocky, the wrestlers had mostly identical move sets and the gameplay was slow and repetitive. Sure, there were some bright sparks like Wrestlefest or….well, mainly just Wrestlefest, and like WrestleMania Arcade that and its predecessor WWF Superstars were arcade games. On consoles, and home computers the wrestling games were quite limited. Wrestlers would just pull off punches and kicks, hit a drop kick and if you’re lucky also manage a body slam and a vertical suplex. Matches would usually end up as something of a grind where you’d need five to ten minutes of wearing down your opponent and more often than not would end up spamming the same few moves over and over until you get their energy bar low enough to go for a pin. It’d always be the same story that you end up hoping you can catch a pinfall early when their energy is three quarters gone, but then they’d kick out and you’d hit two more moves and try again. It’s not that you’re trying to win so much as you’re trying to get the match over with, as a longer match in the older wrestling games didn’t mean more fun, it just meant you had to grind longer.
Well, all that mentality went out the window with the creation of WWF WrestleMania the Arcade Game.
This is the game that allows the Undertaker to not just hit a tombstone piledriver, but actually hit his opponents with actual tombstones. He can also summon ghouls and ghosts and shoot them at his opponents from his hands like Raiden in Mortal Kombat can summon electricity or Ryu and Ken in Street Fighter can conjure a fireball.
Doink the Clown may not seem as legendary a fighter as the rest of the roster on this game, but he was hugely popular at the time, and very much fits into this style of game. For me his being able to pull out a hand buzzer and electrocute opponents is the best example of how this game expands the wrestling character and does something they probably wish they could have actually done in the WWF ring.
Razor Ramon’s arms turn into razors, and when you hit Shawn Michaels you see hearts tumble out of him like how Sonic the hedgehog loses rings.
This game is insane and adds a load of wacky craziness that real life wrestling has been trying to add to the actual sport for the last thirty years. Wrestling purists may be able to look to this game and pinpoint that this was the cross over moment between pro wrestling and video games that spiralled the younger generation into some of the indie silliness that has led to Matt Hardy teleporting, Matt Jackson’s exploding super kick and all the spookiness and nonsense the late great Bray Wyatt was doing as The Fiend.
I suppose this game isn’t quite where it started as The Undertaker and Papa Shango had been around for years and WCW had given us Abdulla the Butcher being electrocuted on an electric chair and an appearance by Robocop.
In wrestling video games, there had been the larger than life Sega WrestleWar and in WWF Raw on the SNES and Mega Drive they had introduced over the top super moves.
The game does mix the gameplay styles of wrestling and Mortal Kombat really well. It plays like those mixed in with a beat em up. You can move up and down the screen and you can’t jump like you can in a traditional fighting game, but after this you have Mortal Kombat style button combos and special moves. This mixes really well with being able to grab a grapple and pull of more moves like in a traditional wrestling game.
And of course, it’s not entirely over the top moves. You can pull off more standard looking wrestling moves, but come on, these were never as satisfying to do.
The game had multiplayer, but was light on gameplay modes. Basically, you’d either do an arcade mode where you go for the Intercontinental or World Heavyweight Championship. The difference between the two is that on the mid card title mode you’d mostly do one on one matches and then towards the end you’d have a two on one handicap match, and finally a three on one match for the belt. When going for the World Title, you’d start with two on one handicap matches and end up with three on one matches where you’d have to defeat three opponents all against you at the same time. But for the Final match, you have the WrestleMania Challenge where you take on all eight of the game’s roster in one match. You have just one energy bar, although I think you get a little energy back for beating an opponent. Fortunately you only go against a maximum of three at a time as the game can only handle four on screen wrestlers at once, and the best news is this is just one fall to a finish and not like the rest of the game where matches are won by being the first to get two falls. Interestingly, the usual best of three format from fighting games does work perfectly with wrestling being the theme as a two out of three fall match, even though it’s not very common these days. The eight on one match is actually called WrestleMania challenge but when it starts it says Royal Rumble on the screen, which shows that a Royal Rumble mode could have easily been added. It’s quite tough, but this isn’t the hardest game to be. Still…eight on one… That’s something you never got in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3!
The game does require you to pin opponents, but you can only do so once you’ve knocked off all your opponent’s energy. Sometimes they will kick out and have regained a bit of energy and get second wind, and this is so annoying if this happens and then you lose. This will mostly happen if you don’t have much energy yourself and are caught off guard.
There’s no submission, DQ or count out in the game, although you may be weaker or lose energy slowly if you’re outside the ring.
The game features commentary which I think was a first in a WWE game and also has a constant music soundtrack to the fights which I really enjoy. It’s bouncy and fits the tone of the WWF new generation era that this came out in the midst of. The game also does feature actual WWE wrestler theme tunes but these aren’t the full tracks which is a shame.
Looking at this game now, if it was made today, it’d be easy to imagine how they could add speciality match types like cage and ladder matches, and still retain the arcade style gameplay, although it’d change the dynamic of the energy bar. Maybe this could work by you can only climb the cage or ladder when you’ve eliminated all your opponent’s energy and then you have a ten or twenty second window to try to climb before their energy comes back slightly. I don’t know.
The game is notorious for featuring weird game endings that are dark or just weird for a wrestling game. And they’re even more weird when you consider these are based on real people. They have Shawn Michaels ravaged in the ring by lusty women who leave him motionless. It then says he becomes a politician. Doink’s celebration includes a stampede by elephants that trample and kill lots of the audience. It says Bret Hart quits wrestling and becomes an Oscar winning actor. Razor Ramon has anything but a good ending where it says he ends up sleeping on benches and disappears.
I have no idea what they were thinking when they added these endings, but it feels like it was the work of someone who was ready to quit the company and somehow no one else checked.
The game came to most home consoles at the time, and whilst in today’s deep dive I’ll just concentrate on the original arcade game, I will note that when I first got this, I had the Super Nintendo version, and this cut both Bam Bam Bigelow and Yokozuna from the game. That left the game with just six wrestlers. Crazy. In the years since, I’ve played most versions of this and so have had a chance to see the full experience, but it still to this day feels weird to have the super heavyweights in there.
The game was followed up by a sequel of sorts in WWF In Your House, but this wasn’t an arcade game and just released on Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. I’ll look at that in depth another day, but it’s just not as good as WrestleMania Arcade.
I would love to see a new WWE, or AEW game made in this style and feels like it’s something that is missing from the world of wrestling video games. We have had the likes of WWE AllStars and WWE Battlegrounds which have both leaned into wacky stuff, with Battlegrounds being the one with the super deformed wrestlers and there being an alligator outside the ring. These were ok, but I want another game where they film the wrestlers in 4k, running at 120 frames per second and we have the Rock as the Final Boss with all kinds of electricity powers. Give me John Cena with a you can’t see me invisibility move and for old times sake, bring back the Undertaker as the connection to this original game whilst he can still go. Have him both with elements of the dead man gimmick and suddenly pull out a motorcycle from his American Bad Ass gimmick.
As much as some WWE games like this, or WrestleFest or No Mercy are loved by fans, it seems unlikely that they’ll ever be rereleased. I can almost believe that a company like Arcade 1Up could get a deal for this to be made as a modern home arcade machine, as they’ve been able to see NBA Jam and old licensed games like the Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles get released when the developers who originally made those games may no longer hold all the licenses. In the case of WrestleMania, the issues are more complex. The game features wrestlers who may no longer be with WWE and sadly half the roster has since passed away. Add to this that the game would need altering to not have the old style WWF logo although if they can get the source code this should be changeable to the block style WWE logo.
It’s just a shame that WWE games always seem to look forwards and not back and even though this would be an easy win, they may not want wrestling fans to have the option that may take them away from the annual WWE 2K releases.
So that’s going to wrap things up for this next part of the Slam Jam Wrestling video game retrospective. In past editions I’ve looked at the Mega CD WWF Rage in the Cage, WWF Superstars on the Nintendo Game Boy, Dreamcast Royal Rumble, and the WrestleMania game on Amiga. Let me know what wrestling video games you’d like me to do a deep dive on in the future, and also let me know your thoughts on WrestleMania the Arcade Game. Where does this rank in the all time great wrestling game list?
What would you rate this game?
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