25 years of the nWo: WCW/nWo Revenge
The New World Order celebrated its 25th anniversary this week, so let's talk about a classic game featuring that stable.
Maybe you aren’t a professional wrestling fan, but you didn’t need to be in order to enjoy the slate of late-90s wrestling video games on the market. Sure, there were some that were just alright, or were outright bad, but not those developed by AKI. Those, to this day, stand out for the ease with which you could figure out their systems, their distinctive sound, and their dedication to making a game feel as big and arcade-y as something based on a spectacle like pro wrestling should be.
WCW/nWo Revenge was not the first wrestling game by AKI, nor even their first WCW-focused one, but it was the first of a series of mega hit, North American wrestling games that they produced along with publisher THQ. Its predecessor, WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, paled in comparison to Revenge, which featured improvements to, well, everything, while retaining the grappling system that made AKI wrestling games so enjoyable to begin with. There’s a reason people got so excited when it turned out that former AKI employees were on the team developing All Elite Wrestling’s upcoming video game, because we might actually have a new wrestling game worth playing that won’t take forever to figure out, that doesn’t attempt to put so much “realism” into the video game version of battle theater that it becomes, well, not very much fun to play.
Listen, it’s fine, I’m not employed as a wrestling writer anymore so no one is going to be inviting me to any more WWE 2K preview events, anyway: the worst parts of those parties was having to stop to play the games they were being thrown for. Give me Revenge, or WrestleMania 2000, or No Mercy over those overly complicated, self-serious things any day.
Anyway, I bring up Revenge today because this week is the 25th anniversary of the formation of one of wrestling’s most significant and influential stables: the New World Order. Sure, Hulk Hogan sucks, and has sucked for many reasons well before he was ever caught on tape being a racist, but you can kick his ass all up and down Revenge, so we will celebrate it.
I’ve already mentioned the grappling for Revenge here as a major part of what makes the game work, but this isn’t even the first time at this site that I’ve brought it up. AKI, and Revenge, were both name dropped in my ranking for the Super Smash Bros. series, as part of the Nintendo top 101:
Smash wasn’t really like other fighting games: it wasn’t anything like the titles that dominated the scene at the time, your King of Fighters and your Street Fighters and your Tekkens and so on. Smash actually had much more in common with the wrestling games developed by AKI, like WCW/nWo Revenge, even though Smash used a more traditional fighting game perspective. It was all in the control scheme: whereas typical fighters used a series of button presses you needed to memorize in order to perform a character’s moves, Smash worked like AKI’s games. The moves are different for each character, but you just have to press a direction and a face button. Every character has an Up + B move, for instance, which doubles as a save from falling to your doom, just like every wrestler in Revenge had moves mapped to similar, directionally-based combinations.
Smash is a game that’s easy to play and difficult to master, just like Revenge (and WrestleMania 2000, and No Mercy), because of this dedicated, directional system. You don’t have to know the ins and outs of the move sets of every wrestler, or how to best wield weapons, or taunt, or pull off more complicated maneuvers involving the ropes or what have you. Hit the button to grapple your opponent, then press A or B, and a direction on the D-Pad. Hold the grapple button longer to strong grapple, and then, once again, press A or B and a direction. You’ve now mastered the core gameplay of WCW/nWo Revenge, and the rest will come to you with time and practice.
Repeat grappling as much as you need to until you can use a special, which is as simple as grappling once more and then hitting the analog stick to perform a wrestler’s signature move. Everything else you can do is as simple as all of this, too, though, learning the effectiveness can take a little more effort or trial and error. Press face buttons at the head or feet of an opponent, and perform either a striking move or a submission one, depending on which wrestler you’re using and what’s mapped to those situational button presses in their move set. Climb to the top rope and jump off, climb out of the ring and grab a weapon from the crowd, Irish whip your opponent and then clobber them with a clothesline, or leapfrog over them to show off, or hit the deck so they run over you and you can hit them on the rebound… you’ve got a lot of options for style here, and you’ll want to utilize them in Revenge, too, since it utilizes a scoring system that emphasizes variety and flash. Put on a show for the people: that’s what wrestling is.
Revenge doesn’t have quite as robust of a selection of game modes as its successors by AKI, which came under the WWE (then WWF) license instead of the WCW one. There is still plenty to do in Revenge, however: unlockable wrestlers, a championship mode for each title belt that WCW had at the time, and a large roster that is broken up into the various factions of this particular era of WCW. Sure, nWo white vs. nWo red was some bullshit that only got worse as time went on and helped to destroy fans’ faith in the company, but in video game form, it can be fun. And if you didn’t dig either faction, well, you can always play as Diamond Dallas Page and Diamond Cut[ter] everyone into the ground, or get revenge for Goldberg by destroying everyone involved in the cattle prod incident, or do what WCW did best, and stick to playing as cruiserweights, whose moves are the flashiest, most fascinating, and varied of any group in the game, whereas guys like Hogan are sometimes about as fun to play as they were to watch.
As hitting play on that video will remind you, these N64-era AKI games had a very specific sound to them. Revenge has a few different wrestling themes that are shared among the entire roster, with the sounds made to fit the character, so it’s not as much of an ambitious leap forward as WrestleMania 2000 having dedicated entrance themes and entrances for every wrestler on the roster. You also just get a costume edit mode instead of a full-on create-a-wrestler, but there is something Revenge has that WrestleMania 2000 does not, and I don’t just mean Rey Mysterio: made-up wrestlers that AKI created for you.
A fun thing about being 12 years old and more into Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mankind than WCW at the time is that I didn’t know that all of the AKI-created wrestlers were, well, that. Sure, AKI Man was obviously a fake, branded character, but how was I supposed to know that the Empire Wrestling Federation contained within the game was not full of actual wrestlers, in a video game where La Parka — a guy dressed up in a full-body skeleton suit, wielding a chair — exists? Plus, AKI actually based these fake wrestlers off of real ones, or at least their move sets and mannerisms, so in the end, 12-year-old me was right: these fictitious wrestlers in their fictitious wrestling federations were as real as anything else in wrestling.
Revenge ended up being THQ’s best-selling game for its console generation, even though the Nintendo 64 had nowhere near the install base of the rival Playstation, and even though games like WrestleMania 2000 and No Mercy were superior titles. The WCW was huge in 1998, and there was almost nothing like Revenge on the North American market to that point. No Mercy and WrestleMania 2000 might have been the better games, but they also arrived on the scene after Revenge had already taken a massive leap forward from World Tour: cartridges weren’t cheap, you know, and we were all enjoying Revenge even after a number of its stars ended up in later WWE games.
Hell, I wasn’t even a huge WCW guy, as I mentioned, and I still had Revenge. I still do! I was playing it earlier this year before I even remembered the math worked out into a round-numbered anniversary: I was just playing it because it’s still fun to do so.
Sure, the nWo ended up fizzling out on a number of occasions, and, as mentioned, invoking it means invoking Hulk Hogan, but on the bright side, we’ve got Revenge. Since it sold nearly two million copies and is a non-Nintendo sports game, it’s actually fairly easy to find these days on the secondhand market, and inexpensive, too. We’re talking $10-12 for the cartridge only, and you can probably get it for less if you stumble upon it in person instead of on Ebay. It’s worth the trip down memory lane, because the game still just feels so good to play, just like it did back in 1998. That grappling system really did make the game, and basically spoiled me forever, too, given my lukewarm reception for so many wrestling games that followed it.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.