25 years of the N64: WWF WrestleMania 2000

WWF No Mercy might be the superior title, but there isn't a wrestling game I've spent more time with in my life than its predecessor.

On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Everything positive I have already written about WCW/nWo Revenge applies to AKI’s followup for the competition, WWF WrestleMania 2000. The controls that are easy to pick up, the music that is extremely of its time but in a good way, the arcade feel to it all that has kept these now decades-old wrestling games in such high esteem against the more modern, “realistic” wrestling games that have dominated the market since. WWF WrestleMania 2000 is better than WCW/nWo Revenge in every way, unless you’re extremely attached to the WCW roster. Don’t worry, though, by this point in time, plenty of those WCW favorites were in WWF and also in this video game. And the ones who weren’t? Well, you could always create them, because AKI left plenty of assets tucked away in the create-a-wrestler mode so you could do that very thing.

Rather than making the game mostly about winning the various titles by successfully taking down a series of opponents, WrestleMania 2000 greatly expanded the modes and ways to play. There are exhibition matches, of course, but there is also a King of the Ring tournament, and a dedicated Royal Rumble, which lets you customize how it’ll play out to your heart’s content, even. Sure, throwing 29 other wrestlers over the top rope is fun, but have you considered ramping that number up to 40, pitting four teams against each other, and making it so that pinfalls and submissions were how you win the Rumble? Let your opponents have 12 wrestlers a piece and see if you can survive the whole time with just a handful of them, it’s your Rumble.

There is also a Pay Per View mode that lets you schedule your own set of matches, in which wrestlers will fight for whatever championships you assign the matches, in whatever format you want — cage match, No DQ, submissions only, and so on. Throw a Royal Rumble match in at a non-Royal Rumble pay-per-view event if you want. In addition, you can also create your own championships to be fought over: you don’t have to be satisfied with just the belts WWF was using at the time of this game’s release. Make WCW’s various titles available if you’d like, or create entirely new ones. You can store eight on the cartridge itself, and another eight on your memory card, so really, go wild.

I mentioned the ability to create wrestlers earlier, and that’s one of the real differentiators between Revenge and WrestleMania 2000. The ability to create a wrestler doesn’t just give you the freedom to make essentially whatever monstrosity or tough guy you want to, but it also gives you a deeper understanding of how the game itself works. You see, you don’t just pick how a wrestler looks, or what they wear, or how much they weigh. You also select every single move they will use, in every situation they might use it. These moves are all on display for you to peruse, picking the ones you want the most for every situation, as specific as “running ground attack [while your opponent is] facing up".” You could pick the Running Austin Elbow Drop (given a damage grade of D), or a more basic Running elbow drop (E), or one of six moves available in this specific scenario. The created character I looked at to remind me for these purposes had a Running Senton Splash (E).

The moves can be viewed in a demo that plays while you scroll through the various options, so you get a sense of not just how strong a move is because of its indicators — its damage grade, whether it will draw blood or not, whether it has the potential to cause a knockout of your opponent — but also just how cool they look. That matters, especially if you’re concerned about matching the vibe of a wrestler’s moves to their overall appearance. You’ll select moves under a number of different areas — Technique, Striking, Grappling, Ground Grappling, High Flying, and Taunt — and each of those has sub-areas that are broken down into more specific situations, like Weak Attack, Strong Attack, Running Attack, Turnbuckle Attack, Apron Attack, and so on.

[Just a note here: the embedded videos, which look like they’re running on HD emulators on a computer, run a lot slower than the actual game does on the N64]

By creating a wrestler, you discover every context available in the game, every context in which you could perform a move. Created wrestlers can have more moves than any of the stock ones, since you can fill every single option with different moves instead of making it so that you do, say, an Austin-style Running elbow drop at every possible opportunity to do one while playing as Stone Cold Steve Austin. It’s worth it to visit this robust section of the game even if you don’t plan on using created wrestlers, just to get a feel for the greatly expanded moveset and contexts available in WrestleMania 2000 compared to Revenge.

You can create some wrestlers whose assets were purposely left in this mode to be discovered, like Kevin Nash and Scott Hall — their signature taunts and finishers are in the game, and faces that look enough like theirs exist, too. There are entire FAQs dedicated to making the most accurate-as-possible WCW wrestlers within WWF WrestleMania 2000, even. Some of them, you’re just working to the best of your ability and what the game has left behind, but some have legitimate faces and gear sitting in here. You can also just make up some random wrestler, too. Still on my memory card are creations of a friend, like the tag team made up of massive powerhouse Carl, and his partner, Canadian Carl, who is much smaller but more acrobatic, and most importantly, is Canadian. At some point, I either figured out how to make Jack Black and Kyle Gas, or found a guide on the internet to help me do it. You can have 16 created wrestlers in your game at a time, between the cartridge and your memory card, which is a serious boost to an already loaded roster if you take the time to fill all those slots, as I’ve done over the years.

The create-a-wrestler situation and all of the other modes I mentioned were huge, and made WWF WrestleMania 2000 a must-play game for me all on their own, but there is another major gameplay mode in here that is still a lot of fun to play, even though it’s somewhat basic. The Road to WrestleMania sees you select a wrestler to play as, and you work your way through the roster and the calendar, trying to become the champion of… well, everything. There will be little bits of storyline interjected throughout the year, feuds with title holders, a Royal Rumble appearance that could net you the main event slot at WrestleMania to win the WWF Championship. It’s got everything in the game all packed into one year of a wrestler’s career. You can use stock wrestlers or created wrestlers, it doesn’t matter. And it all feels even a little more fun than this sounds because WrestleMania 2000 actually used the real themes of these wrestlers as entrance music. It’s something else when the Undertaker decides he’s had enough of your shit so his theme hits before he interferes in your match for a title, even if graphically and audio-wise we are talking about an N64 game here.

Building on what Revenge did best — a simple, directional control scheme paired with face button presses that made learning to play easy while leaving enough depth for mastery to feel like a goal to aspire to and not an automatic, the same kind of control scheme that is still used to this day in games like Super Smash Bros. — by expanding the number of moves a wrestler could perform, while also making every game mode bigger and introducing new ones, is what made WrestleMania 2000 so special, and keeps it so playable 22 years later. (It might be called WrestleMania 2000, but it released in the fall of ‘99.) WWF No Mercy is often — and rightly — credited as the best wrestling game on the Nintendo 64, and for many, the best one period. Like the jump from Revenge to WrestleMania 2000, the leap forward from WrestleMania 2000 to No Mercy is significant: No Mercy added backstage brawls, overhauled many of the game’s systems to make weapon usage and story elements feel deeper and more rewarding, and so on. However, WrestleMania 2000 is the one I spent the most time with. And even though I have No Mercy, too, WrestleMania 2000 is the one I still go back to the most, and that’s why I’m writing about it here during this little anniversary celebration of the console, even if it’s not the universal standard for the best wrestling game on the N64.

A massive selection of wrestlers, centered around the extremely well-known and loaded Attitude Era roster of WWF, without the worst parts of that particular moment in time included. A game where you can play as Rock, as Austin, as Taker, as whichever form of Mick Foley you want, where you can unlock Shawn Michaels, where you can create your dream wrestler and build them up from the weakest punch to the strongest slam. This game has everything besides fully realized women wrestlers, but hell, modern WWE struggles with that in reality sometimes, so I can only fault the game itself for its reflection of the realities of 1999 and WWF’s own issues with women’s wrestling of the time so much. Anyway, it’s incredible that all of this was possible on the N64, really, that all of this was possible so shortly after Revenge, too. It’s a real credit to AKI, and is one of the reasons that you see fans of wrestling and wrestling video games so hyped about the potential for the upcoming All Elite Wrestling video game: key figures in games like WrestleMania 2000 are onboard to create a more modern arcade experience based on the highly enjoyable, highly replayable AKI games of the past. We’ll see how that ends up shaking out, but regardless of the quality of that still-in-development AEW game, WWF WrestleMania 2000 still exists. And I’ll still be playing it even if I never end up writing a word about it again.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go devise a pay-per-view featuring created wrestlers vying for created belts. I’m pretty sure that’s what Tony Khan was doing before he he was on message boards dreaming up the promotion he’d eventually finance.

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