If I was strolling through an arcade looking for a wrestling game to play, then that could only have meant that my eyes were scouting out the location of the establishment's WWF Wrestlefest machine. Because as far as I was concerned, there were no other wrestling games of note. Wrestlefest was the only one that mattered. It was the undisputed king of its genre and the only wrestling game that was worth playing.
That's where my mind was at in 1991 and in the subsequent year-and-a-half period.
Though, when we approached the machine and inspected its display from up-close, we quickly recognized the error in our judgment. This new game wasn't some cheap, low-quality imitation of the genre's finest works, we learned. Rather, it was one of the most original-looking, awe-inspiring wrestling game we'd seen in years!
In that moment, I couldn't believe what I was seeing: Mike Haggar, one of my all-time-favorite video game characters, was in this game! The big, burly wrestler with whom I was regularly and joyously tearing through the streets of Metro City (sometimes in a bid to "earn a WWF contract," which is part of a long story that you can read about in my Final Fight piece) was available for play in a game that he was truly made for!
That fact alone was enough for me to award Slam Masters the label of "instant classic"!
And when our first match began, Slam Masters surprised us again with how it handled its wrestling action. It didn't, as we were expecting it to, play by the established rules: There were no automatic lock-ups. There was no jockeying for leverage. And striking moves weren't largely ineffectual love taps that were implemented into the game only to create the appearance of authenticity.
Slam Masters' action wasn't a simulation of the safe, family-friendly wrestling that we watched on TV every weekend afternoon, no. Rather, it was an exhibition of the brutal, no-holds-barred wrestling action that we'd see in every hardcore fight film.
Naturally I gravitated toward the known entity: Mike Haggar, whose move-set, I was thrilled to learn, included all of his moves from Final Fight!
Dominick gravitated more toward the speedy masked characters: the luchador El Stingray and the Japanese martial-artist Scorpion (both of whom grew to become my favorite secondary characters). And I encouraged him to do so because I felt that a small, speedy character would be the perfect compliment to Haggar, who was honestly slow and lumbering and could benefit from having a partner who could execute quick strikes and thus help him to more easily initiate grapples.
It had been a while since an arcade game had impressed us that thoroughly, and by the time we left More Fun that day, Dominick and I were in agreement that Slam Masters had, in a very short period, already established itself as one of our all-time favorites.
Most memorably, we devoted a ton of our time to Slam Masters during our future trips to Atlantic City. We were quick to locate and play it when it popped up in TropWorld Hotel's indoor amusement center: Tivoli Pier, which had a circular arcade area that could be accessed from the center portion of the spiraling ramp that led up to the place's second floor.
Those were fun times, man.
Slam Masters was the kind of game that I wanted to play all the time, but unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity to do so. I didn't have the type of money that I needed to justify daily trips to the arcade.
As we moved deeper into 1994, the possibility of Slam Masters, which was now more than a year old, coming to the SNES was looking more and more like a long shot, and I just about gave up hope of such a thing happening.
Of course I went out and bought it the moment it arrived in stores!
As I was spending time with the game, I also started to notice the ways in which it took inspiration from the pro-wrestling world that my friends and I knew so well: The unnamed NPC ripping off his shirt in the title sequence was an obvious homage to Hulk Hogan. Alexander the Grater was clearly based on the monstrous Big Van Vader. El Stingray was inspired by luchador legend Lizmark. And Titanic Tim was an obvious amalgamation of wrestling big men Andre the Giant, Giant Gonzales and Giant Baba. (I'd never actually seen Lizmark or Baba in action, but I knew what they looked like because I'd seen pictures of them in the old wrestling magazines that Dominick kindly gave me.)
Sadly, though, I eventually moved on from Slam Masters because my friends lost interest in the game and playing it by myself wasn't nearly as fun. I loved the game, yeah, but I couldn't deny that single-player play-through attempts only served to magnify the aggravating nature of the CPU opponents' AI and thus create a less enjoyable experience.
Quite simply, playing Slam Masters just wasn't the same without my pals. So I decided to leave it behind.
But I have no such laments about my days with the original Saturday Night Slam Masters. Considering who we were at the time and where out interests lied, it was the perfect game for my friends and I. It was one from a shrinking pool of games that had the ability to bring us together and provide us the quintessential arcade experience that we were looking for.
I return to it on occasion and always enjoy my time with it, but I don't have anywhere near as much fun with it as I did when I played it with my friends. The experience just isn't the same without them. And the fact is that it never again will be. That becomes apparent to me every time I play the game. I'm reminded that the old days are sadly long gone, and I'll never be able to recreate the experiences I had back then.
But even then, I'll still be able to derive great enjoyment from Slam Masters by remembering what it meant to my friends and I and how excited it made us feel about being a part of the arcade and console scenes.
During that period, the WWF, thanks to the efforts of its larger-than-life cast of "Superstars," had become almost synonymous with the pseudo-sport, and its licensees at LJN and Technos had cornered the market for wrestling games with their WWF-branded works. It ruled the world.
This reality was most strongly reflected in the arcade scene, where meaningful competition was pretty much nonexistent. WWF Superstars and WWF Wrestlefest were the only wrestling games that you ever saw. They were the only ones that arcade vendors seemed to care about. So it made sense for us to conclude that WWF-titled games were so superior in quality that other companies had given up on the idea of trying to make wrestling games that could compete with them.
There were occasions in which my friends and I would stumble upon the odd Wrestle War or Fire Pro machine as we browsed an arcade, yeah, but we'd never see anyone playing them. And in every such instance, all we could think was that the era of non-licensed wrestling games was over and fans no longer cared about wrestling games whose worlds and rosters were entirely fictionalized.
"From this point onward," we were certain, "the market will belong solely to wrestling games that are based on real-life properties."
That's why my friend Dominick and I were so surprised when, on a random summer day in 1993, we suddenly came across a newly arriving, rather-hefty-sized non-WWF-branded wrestling game as we were browsing our way through the More Fun arcade over at Caesar's Bay Bazaar. It had been so long since we'd seen anything like it.
As we viewed the game from a distance, we figured that it probably wasn't worth our time. It wasn't bearing the WWF logo (the lack of which, we were conditioned to believe, was an indicator of an inferior product), after all, and its generic-sounding title title had us convinced that it was likely an insultingly shallow knockoff of the wrestling games that we loved.
Its name was Saturday Night Slam Masters, and it was produced by Capcom, which was currently the king of arcades!
Now, we didn't actually see Capcom's name anywhere on the arcade unit (because, apparently, making simple observations wasn't our strong suit), but we had no doubt that the game was created by the company of legend because it had an unmistakable graphical style and it contained Mike Haggar, who could be seen in the demo tossing fools around in the same way that he did in Final Fight!
That fact alone was enough for me to award Slam Masters the label of "instant classic"!
And Slam Masters made an absolutely spectacular first impression on us with its awesome visual presentation, flashy animation, and powerfully raucous energy. It was big. It was loud and reverberant. It looked amazing. And it had a strikingly creative fighting system that instantly and strongly distinguished it from any other wrestling game we'd ever played.
We spent our entire first session playing in the "Battle Royal" mode, which, we were happy to see, supported up to four players (business was apparently slow that day, so we had to settle for fighting pairs of CPU opponents). At the start, we were certain that Battle Royal was going to be a close analog to Wrestlefest's "Royal Rumble" mode, but it actually turned out be something surprisingly unique: a tag-team-based challenge, which was much different from what a "Battle Royal" descriptor normally implied.
Mainly, there were no tag-ins. You instead played by Tornado Rules, which allowed for all four competitors to be in the ring at the same time!
Slam Master's gameplay, rather, was more of a hybrid of systems and mechanics borrowed from Final Fight and Street Fighter II, which is to say that its striking moves were executed using simple button-taps and its grappling moves were executed using directional inputs and advanced directional combinations (like half- and quarter-circle motions).
And this style of play allowed us to approach the combat however we pleased: We could deplete opponents' health meters by repeatedly striking them with combinations of punches and kicks. We could, as the game's title encouraged us to do, pick up opponents and viciously slam them to the mat with traditional wrestling moves or the type of insane-looking maneuvers that were only possible in a video game. Or we could employ a more-strategic game plan and engage opponents by tactically striking them and trying to stun them and thus create openings for clean grapples.
And unlike in Superstars and Wrestlefest, it was possible to grapple opponents from both the front and rear positions! We were excited about the addition of rear grapples because it provided us the opportunity to execute an even wider range of bone-crunching, viscerally pleasing wrestling moves!
Also, you could execute all manner of pinning combinations, and because the rules were enforced by an external entity, you never have to wait for a referee to saunter over and slowly begin his count and thus give your opponent more time to recover and kick out. And you could pummel opponents with any objects that were lying around (bottles, buckets, steel chairs, et al.), and you didn't even need to leave the ring to obtain them; the surrounding fans would eagerly supply you bludgeoning items by tossing them into the ring!
This game, we kept learning, had so many new and interesting ways of engaging with opponents and interacting with surrounding environments!
And we loved it! It was exactly the type of chaotic, over-the-top action that we wanted from our arcade games!
Slam Masters was an incredibly fun and engaging game, and we couldn't tear ourselves away from it! We played it almost the entire time we were there!
I'd say that we dumped about ten bucks worth of quarters into its machine that day.
We did so, also, because we were enamored with how the game presented itself. It was packed with personality: Its character entrances were brimming with intensity and embellished with dramatic pyro displays and strobe effects; its impressively animated crowds were wild and aggressive; and its wrestling moves' reverberations were thunderous!
Every one of the game's scenes, actions, and environments was visually and aurally appealing. Every one of them delighted us, engrossed us, and made us feel as though we were playing a highly authentic interpretation of our favorite televised "sport."
And its wrestlers, in contrast to the WWF-titled games', weren't uniform in terms of proportion and basic functions. They all had their own body dimensions, physical attributes, striking moves, and personalized slams. Also, there was no homogeneity to their fighting techniques. Each one of them adhered to a different discipline, and this worked to create a great mix of wrestling styles: strong style, technical, high-flying, lucha, puroresu, and even alternative styles like Rasta's hardcore jungle-fighting.
The result was a wrestling game that had a ton of variety to its action!
Additionally, each wrestler reacted to wins and losses in different ways. If he won, he'd strike one of two trademarked victory poses and then target his fallen opponent with a biting quip (he'd say something like, "Drop me a line so I can visit your hospital room!"). And he if lost, he'd react by throwing out a lame-but-humorous pun!
"This game has everything!" we thought.
So yeah--Slam Masters turned out to be a next-level wrestling game, and we weren't surprised by that because it was made by Capcom, which was, at the time, the best video-game developer in the world and a company that was producing one amazing arcade game after another.
Most of them were easy to execute because they were single-input moves: His standard strike was the familiar gut punch, which emitted the same forceful wooshing sound. His jumping attack was the fully extended dropkick. And his up-titled reverse grappling move was the vicious back body drop!
His other two patented maneuvers could be executed with button-combos, both of which I was easily able to intuit because I had intimate knowledge of Zangief's similar move-set and all of his moves' required inputs. As I predicted, pressing both action buttons simultaneously prompted Haggar to execute his space-clearing spinning clothesline, and making a full-circle motion with the control stick while in a grapple triggered his devastating spinning piledriver!
I was absolutely delighted by how Haggar played. I loved how Capcom faithfully incorporated his Final Fight moves into his move-set and filled out the rest of the set with moves that looked as though they were taken directly from Zangief's repertoire. He was exactly the type of wrestler that I imagined him to be when I was making all of those Haggar-versus-Zangief comparison charts.
I was impressed, also, that the designers thought to include his daughter, Jessica. During one of his victory animations, she'd run out from the back, clad in the same red dress, and then enter the ring and participate in his celebration!
"These cats didn't leave anything out!" I thought.
Capcom's staying so true to the character was something that strongly resonated with it. It was one my most memorable aspects of my first experience with Slam Masters.
We ultimately settled on the combination of Haggar and Scorpion and spent all of our time repeatedly battling for tag-team supremacy. And, really, our only true roadblock was our dwindling collection of quarters. Had we brought more money with us, we probably would have spent another two to three hours playing through the Battle Royal mode!
During that session, we did engage in one-on-one combat, yeah, but we only did so a single time. Because that was all it took for us to conclude that single-player action was largely unexciting and that Slam Masters was better suited for frantic multiplayer action. (Also, the math suggested that teaming up was the best way to avoid defeat and thus lose quarters.)
And like I said: The two of us would have probably continued playing the game until nighttime had we not depleted our funds.
That's how addictively fun the game's action was.
Consequently it joined the ranks of Double Dragon, Final Fight, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and WWF Wrestlefest and earned a spot on the list of top-tier arcade games for which we'd always be on the lookout. From then on, we knew, we'd continue to seek it out whenever we visited an arcade and eagerly play through at least one time.
By then, the late-autumn months of 1993, Tivoli Pier's business had begun to flat-line due to waning interest from its intended target audience, kids and teenagers, (or, rather, their increasingly cash-strapped parents, who decided that the ticket prices were too exorbitant and that it was better to instead squander what was left of their money in the casino), so even during weekends, there were very few patrons wandering around the place.
So whenever we visited Tivoli Pier, we pretty much had the entire place to ourselves (every space including the arcade, the roller coaster, and the fun house)! We were free to team up Haggar and Scorpion and repeatedly tear through CPU competitors and do so without having to worry about pesky interlopers suddenly dropping in and disrupting our march toward the tag-team championship!
Those were fun times, man.
So as had become my tradition after I became enamored with a recently released arcade game, I excitedly grabbed each new issue of Nintendo Power, took it up to my room, flipped directly to its Pak Watch section, and looked for any sign that said game was coming to the SNES, which had proven that it had the power and the capability to convincingly replicate some of the era's best-looking arcade games.
Each time, though, it was the same story: There was absolutely no mention of the Slam Masters. No rumors of anything. And after a few months, I started to consider the possibility that the game simply wasn't coming to the SNES.
It could have been, I thought, that the game's technical specifications were simply too far beyond what the SNES could actually handle. Or maybe it was the case that the game just didn't achieve enough commercial success to justify the cost of bringing it to home consoles.
I couldn't say for sure.
As we moved deeper into 1994, the possibility of Slam Masters, which was now more than a year old, coming to the SNES was looking more and more like a long shot, and I just about gave up hope of such a thing happening.
But just as I was preparing to move on and start focusing on other games, it suddenly happened: Saturday Night Slam Masters showed up out of nowhere in Nintendo Power Volume 61! It was the subject of a feature-length piece! (This was surprising to me because it was highly unusual for a game that was never mentioned before, in a preview or even a blurb, to receive feature coverage. But that's what it got. It was treated like royalty right out of the gate.)
There it was in all its glory, looking as spectacular as I remembered it! Its visuals weren't, as far as I could tell, compromised in the least! I was so happy to see it!
And once again I was reminded of how surreal it felt to be playing a faithfully recreated arcade port from the comfort of my own home--to be using a control pad and a TV to intimately interact with and explore a game that was previously domain to a hulking monstrosity of an arcade cabinet and a machine that was so technologically advanced that it needed an enormous motherboard (one of those "big green chips," as I called them) to power it.
Whenever I was doing so, I felt as though I was breaking the rules and finding a forbidden way to access to a game that wasn't meant to be played in a personal space. There was great allure to such a scenario. It was always exciting to experience. (It was great, also, to be free from the restraint of having to pump a quarter into a coin slot every two minutes!)
Playing the SNES version of Slam Masters was about conjuring that feeling, yes, but I also saw it as an opportunity to gain a new appreciation for elements that I wasn't able to properly appraise when I was playing the game in arcades. I'm talking about elements like the soundtrack, which was always drowned out by the combination of the arcade cacophony and the game's thunderous sound effects.
As I listened to the game's music, I wasn't surprised to learn it was everything that Capcom music tended to be: high in quality and rockin' from beginning to end! (Its spirited metal tones were highly reminiscent of Mega Man X's, which was saying a lot because I considered the latter to be the standard-bearer for spirited, adrenaline-raising 16-bit music.)
My favorite piece was Haggar's powerfully energetic, heroic-sounding entrance theme (it perfectly encapsulated who he was as a character). I'd get pumped up every time I listened to it! And of course I made sure to record it with my tape recorder and use it as background accompaniment to my personalized exercise routine (rapidly walking in circles, mainly).
Having the game all to myself allowed me to unimpededly experiment with the characters and take the time to discover all of their moves and list them in my video-game-themed "Superbooks" (and, as was my usual practice, place them in meticulously drawn giant, symmetrical charts). It allowed me to play at a more leisurely pace and dedicate a lot of time to learning about the game's intricacies.
The thing that I was most shocked to learn was that you could pick up weapons that were lying around on the outside and violently toss them at an opponent who was standing in the ring!
"How awesome is that?!" I said aloud the first time I witnessed an item being thrown into the ring.
I saw it as a next-level wrestling-game mechanic, and I was always looking to exploit it. In fact, I dedicated entire sessions to standing outside the ring and flinging bottles and buckets at Jumbo Flapjack and Titanic Tim from a safe distance!
"You can't do anything like this in Superstars, Wrestlefest or any of LJN's WWF-licensed SNES games!" I'd always think as I was doing so.
It was yet another game mechanic that made Slam Masters feel more advanced than its contemporaries.
What was great, also, was that I now had access to a manual, and thus I had the opportunity to learn more about the characters' backgrounds and story arcs.
Mostly, I found it fascinating how Slam Masters' world overlapped with Street Fighter IIs and Final Fight's and made some curious allusions to them. It was said that Biff Slamkovich was an associate (and perhaps a training partner) of Zangief (whose absence from Slam Masters disappointed me because Haggar vs Zangief was my ultimate video-game dream match, and I would have loved to have had the opportunity to frequently match them up against each other). Gunloc was apparently Guile's brother and a rival to Cody, with whom he was always fighting over Jessica. Haggar, "The Uncivil Servant," was described to be "the former mayor of Metro City," the mention of which meant a lot to a continuity hound like me. And King Rasta Mon was essentially Blanka in a wrestler's skin, which made me wonder if there was a possible relationship between the two of them.
Slam Masters' world was, to my surprise, more fully formed than I originally imagined, and it had a lot of intriguing aspects to it. I enjoyed thinking about its characters and how they were connected to each other and to characters in Capcom's other series.
As I was spending time with the game, I also started to notice the ways in which it took inspiration from the pro-wrestling world that my friends and I knew so well: The unnamed NPC ripping off his shirt in the title sequence was an obvious homage to Hulk Hogan. Alexander the Grater was clearly based on the monstrous Big Van Vader. El Stingray was inspired by luchador legend Lizmark. And Titanic Tim was an obvious amalgamation of wrestling big men Andre the Giant, Giant Gonzales and Giant Baba. (I'd never actually seen Lizmark or Baba in action, but I knew what they looked like because I'd seen pictures of them in the old wrestling magazines that Dominick kindly gave me.)
There were plenty of other references, too, and they meant a lot to me because they showed me that the game's creators were knowledgeable about wrestling and its history and were passionate about both subjects. They certainly cared more about wrestling's legacy than the WWF, whose eccentric chairman, Vince McMahon, clearly had contempt for the sport and its legends (he would regularly bring in famous territorial stars, dress them up in silly costumes, and then humiliate them while pretending that they never existed before).
I considered Slam Masters' respectful portrayal of pro-wrestling to be an important part of the package. It made the game's world and its characters feel all the more authentic and thought-provoking.
Sadly, though, I eventually moved on from Slam Masters because my friends lost interest in the game and playing it by myself wasn't nearly as fun. I loved the game, yeah, but I couldn't deny that single-player play-through attempts only served to magnify the aggravating nature of the CPU opponents' AI and thus create a less enjoyable experience.
The biggest problem was that CPU opponents had insane priority (Jumbo, in particular, was practically untouchable), and I couldn't count on my partner, who was constantly getting himself double-teamed, to make smart decisions. In every match, I was basically battling two high-priority-having opponents on my own.
Otherwise, the game's action had a tendency to become too strike-heavy, and consequently matches would routinely degenerate into battles to see who could win a shin-kicking contest. And I necessarily had to engage in such contests because it was almost impossible to win a grapple against a CPU opponent.
So what I discovered was that Slam Masters was best enjoyed as a multiplayer game. Its true power lied in its ability to bring people together and give them a platform to enjoy some fun, frenzied wrestling action and feed off of each other's enthusiastic energy.
Quite simply, playing Slam Masters just wasn't the same without my pals. So I decided to leave it behind.
Years later, during a random Gamefaqs search, I discovered that Capcom had produced a Slam Masters sequel called Ring of Destruction: Slam Masters II. It had only been released in Japan and Europe.
I excitedly loaded it up on MAME, anticipating that I'd dug up a hidden gem, but my mood quickly changed as soon as I saw what it was. Disappointingly it wasn't the expansive sequel that I expected it to be, no. Rather, it was simply the original Slam Masters transformed into a derivative fighting game!
It contained a few new characters (one of which was Victor Ortega, our previously unnamed shirt-ripping title-screen character), yeah, but the rest of its content was comprised mostly of recycled Slam Masters assets, all of which was rejiggered to create and accommodate a single-plane one-on-one fighting game.
"Why would Capcom, one of the industry's biggest innovators, follow the misguided trend of turning action-game sequels into derivative fighting games?" I questioned as I sampled Ring of Destruction's gameplay.
I was baffled by that decision.
I felt that there was potential to do so much more with the Slam Master series, but apparently Capcom didn't agree with my assessment. It decided, instead, that its best option was to use Slam Masters a vehicle to further entrench itself in the fighting-game market and make some easy money. That was the wrong path, I thought.
Slam Masters could have been a long-running series (and inevitably included Zangief, which would have allowed me to finally book my Haggar-versus-Zangief dream match without having to turn to M.U.G.E.N!) and one of arcade gaming's strongest pillars, but instead it was inexplicably robbed of its identity and lost to a genre that would soon drown in its own excess.
And that's a damn shame.
It played an important role in our collective story.
I return to it on occasion and always enjoy my time with it, but I don't have anywhere near as much fun with it as I did when I played it with my friends. The experience just isn't the same without them. And the fact is that it never again will be. That becomes apparent to me every time I play the game. I'm reminded that the old days are sadly long gone, and I'll never be able to recreate the experiences I had back then.
But even then, I'll still be able to derive great enjoyment from Slam Masters by remembering what it meant to my friends and I and how excited it made us feel about being a part of the arcade and console scenes.
And I'll be able to continue saying, with confidence, that my memories of the enormous impact that Slam Masters made on us way back in the summer months of 1993 and beyond will never fade.
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