Wrestling Vs. UFC: The (Video) Game’s Changing

The ’80s featured the rise of two major cultural forces: video games and the World Wildlife Fund World Wrestling Federation, later to start being honest about the stuntwork in their shows by calling themselves World Wrestling Entertainment (there was also that lawsuit, but let’s not talk about that.) And it was pretty much inevitable that they’d combine forces, just like every pop culture robot from the ’80s, to dominate the minds of grade-school boys everywhere and later create awkward moments in college when it was pointed out it was all about sweaty men touching each other.

But lately, wrestling games have been facing a hardcore challenge: namely, UFC. Just like UFC is starting to make wrestling submit in the TV arena, it’s increasingly taking over video games as well. So what happened? We’ve got a few theories about that…and a few pitfalls the UFC games can avoid or the wrestling games can crawl out of:

1. Familiarity Breeds Contempt

It’s pretty hard to imagine a game franchise going on very long, because most franchises just don’t last. Either the audience outgrows them or they outgrow the audience, or they get driven into the ground until they die, like Sonic. About the only franchises to really survive are Nintendo’s, and that’s pretty much because a new generation of kids pops up every year to learn Italian stereotypes from the Japanese. We’ve got UFC games and we’ve got WWE games.

And of course wrestling games were running this risk. There have been WWE games for at least twenty freakin’ years. For most gamers, that’s either their entire lives, or a huge chunk of it. Pretty much every console since the Commodore 64 has had at least one wrestling game, and we’re just counting the ones based on a license, featuring actual professional wrestlers. The number of games with knockoff wrestlers like Bulk Bogan and The Penultimate Warrior, we’ve got no idea, but we bet we could dig one out for at least arcades before the NES cart hit the stage.

That’s a lot of time for gamers to get used to the idea that wrestling games are just kinda, well, there, and they can be taken for granted. It’s like Madden; you know, every year, that a new Madden will be pumped out like clockwork. So why buy the new one when it’s just the same thing?

2. The Stars Don’t Change

One of the key aspects of any fighting game is roster changes. Yeah, the classics stay around; it’s not Street Fighter without Ryu and Ken. But you also had new fighters to learn, like Akuma, Eddie Gordo Dee Jay, and…um…Dan.

Let's just forget this guy ever existed, OK?

The WWE games, though, are a bit more limited. There’s really only room for the most popular guys, and those don’t really change that much. They try to get around this with a “Create-a-Wrestler” mode, but it’s got the same limits as any other “create-a-character” mode; it’s really just a character you’ve already played with new pants and probably a goofy name.

3. The Gameplay Is Getting Stale

Just like any marriage, you’ve got to keep things fresh if you want to keep things going. Otherwise, after you use up all the other techniques, like lingerie, drinking yourselves stupid, and infidelity, the marriage crashes and burns. And it’s no different with long-running video game franchises.

If we’re being honest, this is pretty much a function of wrestling itself: there’s only so much you can insert into the game and still call it “wrestling”. Sure, THQ can tack on new modes and new gimmicks, like a Highlight Reel or responding to questions in the ring, but the basic gameplay can’t exactly be changed drastically.

UFC hasn’t really had time to get stale: there have only been seven games, one of which, “Sudden Impact”, was considered so bad the franchise went away for an entire console generation. It’s worth remembering that the recent franchise of “WWE Raw Vs. Smackdown” started off with incredible scores: people loved the heck out of those games. But slowly, over time, the scores began dropping, because people got used it and there was just no way to keep it fresh, like egg salad left on a buffet in the middle of August.

4. Wrestling is Low-Key In Pop Culture Right Now

This isn’t to say wrestling is dead as a cultural phenomenon or that there aren’t huge fans of wrestling. It’s not like Vince McMahon will be homeless in the near future, unless they’ve written that into a plotline. But even wrestling fans have to admit, a lot has changed since the Rock decided to chase a movie career and wound up wearing fairy wings.

And it’s not like this hasn’t happened before, either. Somewhere in the mid-’90s, wrestling took a bit of a step back from pop culture. But it never left.

Similarly, it’s not like wrestling games aren’t selling. But people are kind of bored with them. The UFC offers a middle ground between wrestling games and fighting games, and it’s different. It also helps that UFC is rising rapidly in the public eye, starting out as kind of seedy and now enjoying something of the level of success that the WWE saw in the early ’90s. After all, you’ve got Quinton “Rampage” Jackson in “The A-Team”, as B.A. Baracus, probably one of the most memorable ’80s badasses, and Randy Couture is starring with…Stone Cold Steve Austin and Sylvester freakin’ Stallone. If that doesn’t sound familiar, you didn’t grow up in the ’80s.

5. Nobody, and We Mean Nobody, Is Bulletproof

We’re going to shift gears for a moment here, and talk about another ongoing franchise, football games.

The Madden series, observant gamers might note, has all the flaws and problems we’ve been talking about: repetitive gameplay, long-running franchise, familiarity, football coming and going in pop cultural prominence. So why isn’t Madden, bemoaned by a lot of gamers from being the same thing in a minorly tweaked package, every frickin’ year, suffering from the same problem?

Well, it was. 2K Sports, Sega’s sports arm, was mounting a serious challenge to EA’s precious John Madden franchise, not least because 2K had the distinct advantage of not featuring John Madden, one of the most annoying voices in sports this side of Howard Cosell. Increasingly, the ESPN 2K series was handing Madden its ass as it moved from a Dreamcast exclusive to all of the major platforms, and in 2005, it was daring enough to open up by selling the game at $20, a third of what Madden cost and a daring power play to break EA’s hold on football games.

So what did EA do? Did it innovate? Did it revamp? No, it paid the NFL a fortune and got the exclusive rights to feature the NFL in all video games for five years, and if that wasn’t a big enough kick in the crotch, they did the same thing with ESPN, cutting 2K off from both of its sponsors. And to keep people from actually enjoying the video game they paid $60 for, EA pretty regularly kneecaps online play for previous Madden iterations. You can’t even play Madden ’09 online. EA claims it was the economy; gamers are, not unreasonably, skeptical.

We’d like to think that Vince McMahon and THQ aren’t that much of a bunch of d-bags in the first place, but really, even if they were, they just don’t enjoy the ability to shamelessly manipulate their fans that EA does; there’s less online gameplay and less fan loyalty than with Madden. But the point is, even the people with a seeming death grip can be taken down.

So, wrestling fans, take heart, and UFC fans…don’t get too cocky. There’s plenty of room at the top in gaming, and just as much room on the way down.