Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #45

WWF Wrestlemania

It was my birthday: August 18th, 1995.

I remember that day well. It was the day in which I was suddenly slapped in the face by a cold new reality that had, after a years-long effort, finally succeeded in its mission to replace the one that I'd know for the 16 years of my life.

I vividly recall the events that occurred that day. They stand out in my memory because they epitomize what my life had become.

Up until that day, it had always been the case that I looked forward to celebrating my birthday. I got excited about the idea of enjoying a fun day out with family and friends. There were few days that I anticipated more.

But on that day, things were different. All I felt was emptiness.

The truth was that I didn't have many friends left. Mike and Chris had since moved away, the crew from 73rd Street (which was where my aunt lived) had split up, and my brother's friends' younger siblings were no longer coming around. And because I'd lost the ability to meaningfully socialize with other kids, I was failing to make any new friends.

At the same time, my parents had become detached and completely wrapped up in their work, and resultantly they no longer had any interest in organizing the usual day-long birthday festivities that had always meant so much to me. They were living in another world.

And in the saddest turn, my only desire, now, was to stay home and be as far away from public spaces as possible. And I didn't know why that was. I struggled to understand what had changed and why I was feeling that way.

That's how it was on August 18th, 1995--the worst birthday I'd ever had.

There was no party. There were no card games. There were no visiting family members. There was no group of friends. And there was basically nothing to which I could point and use as evidence that today was a special occasion of any kind.

The only thing that happened was that my father drove my friend Dominick and I over to some local amusement center and then proceeded to wander off (he mostly hung out by the pay phones in the corner and talked to his friends and business associates). Over the course of our stay, he infrequently joined us between calls and bought us some snacks, but that was about it. His mind, we could see, was clearly somewhere else.

Honestly, so was mine. The fact was that I didn't want to be there, and I spent much of the afternoon wishing that I was back home, in our den, where things made sense.

Ultimately, after moping around for a bit, I decided that the best way to handle the situation was to head over to the arcade area with Dominick, play some old favorites, and hope that the hours dropped off quickly.

I was feeling so down, really, that I couldn't possibly have anticipated the redeeming moment that played out seconds later.

At the time, I was, as usual, on the lookout for the game that I considered to be the perfect starter: WWF Wrestlefest, which by 1995 had become an arcade mainstay. And I was certain that I'd spotted its cabinet somewhere on the arcade area's left side, near the windows.

But as I drew nearer to the machine, I started to notice that its banner's title art was strangely dissimilar to Wrestlefest's and its cabinet's frame lacked the familiar wide-length control panel.

"Did Technos update or revise the cabinet's look?" I wondered as I examined its visual details. "Because there's clearly something different about it."

I got my answer seconds later, when the crowd of kids dispersed a bit and the action on the unit's monitor finally came into view. And all I can say is that I was astonished by what was revealed.

In that moment, my brain ceased its normal functions and began to short circuit. Resultantly, I came to a complete stop and subsequently entered into a state of paralysis. And I continued to stand there, motionless, as my mind attempted to interpret the meaning of the powerful images that were being displayed on that monitor.

This wasn't WWF Wrestlefest or even the older WWF Superstars, no. It was something new. It was called WWF Wrestlemania, and it looked absolutely incredible!

I was so completely awed by what I was seeing that it took me a good minute or two to break out of the spell and regain control of my senses.

That's how breathtaking Wrestlemania's visuals were. They were the best I'd ever seen in a game, and they were so beyond the norm that I couldn't even believe that they were real.

"How is this even possible?" I wondered as I observed and examined the game's characters and their movements.

Wrestlemania's weren't the usual cartoony approximations of the Superstars I was seeing on TV every week, no. They were, in great contrast, stunningly realistic reproductions of them. Their level of detail and animation was so astonishingly high, in fact, that it helped them to easily surpass the fighters seen in Mortal Kombat 3, which was, at the time, the standard-bearer for realistic-looking characters.

Back then, producing a game that looked "real" was considered to be a huge achievement and the ultimate expression of game design. It was what every company strove to do. And from what I could see, Wrestlemania was the pinnacle of that movement. It was indisputably the new king of the mountain.

And I couldn't wait for the patrons who were currently playing it to clear away so that I could get a chance to play it!

I went in expecting Wrestlemania to be a graphically superior expansion of Wrestlefest, whose engine, I felt, still hadn't been used to its full potential. "There's still so much more than they can do with it!" I was certain.

But to my surprise, the game turned out to be something else entirely.

There were two immediate differences: There was no Royal Rumble mode, and the tag-team mode wasn't available for solo play. A single player could only select to compete in the "Intercontinental Championship" and "World Wrestling Federation Championship" modes, neither of which appeared to be distinct in any way.

So the options were disappointingly limited. (And because Dominick wasn't with me at the time and the other kids had left the area, I had no choice but to settle for solo play.)

What surprised me more, though, was that the game completely abandoned Wrestlefest's grappling system and put most of its emphasis on rapid-fire striking, which worked to create a pace that much speedier and more frantic than the previous WWF-titled arcade games'.

And as I observed how the action was playing out, I started to become filled with the sense that Wrestlemania was less a wrestling game and more like a fighting game in the vein of Mortal Kombat! (At this point, I had no clue that both games were made by the same company, so I saw the similarity in play-style as a mere coincidence.)

Interestingly, the wrestlers didn't throw simple punches and kicks or execute traditional wrestling moves, no. Rather, in a completely surreal fashion, they smacked each other over the head with hammers, buckets, flails and other bludgeoning items; tossed each other around like rag dolls; leapt miles in the air to perform bone-crunching slams on whichever opponents were in their grasp; and even fired out projectiles!

Also, they'd win matches not by earning a three-count pinfall or forcing a submission but by completely draining an opponent's health and sealing the victory by making a formal cover. (A fallen opponent could escape defeat with his "Second Wind" ability, which became available when his combo meter was maxed out. At first, though, I wasn't aware of the Second Wind mechanic, so I assumed that the CPU characters were able to kick out with no health because they were, as usual, simply cheating.)

And because Wrestlemania played this way, it could barely be called a "wrestling" game. It could only be described, rather, as a wild, over-the-top fighting game-beat-'em-up hybrid.

And I loved it!

I hadn't even been playing for more than a few seconds before I totally forgot about the game's lack of alternate modes and its abandonment of Wrestlefest's formula. I was deeply engrossed in the action, and all I could think about was how amazing the game the looked and how fresh and exciting its style of gameplay felt.

The whole time, I was blown away by the game's presentation and specifically the amount of effort that the developers put into capturing the performers' distinct personalities. The wrestlers moved about and behaved exactly like they did in real life. Their every pose, taunt and mannerism was painstakingly reproduced: the Undertaker slowly stalked opponents, Shawn Michaels smugly chewed his gum as if he was arrogantly dismissing the competition, and Razor Ramon trash-talked his victims as he was pounding on them.

I felt like I was controlling the actual wrestlers. It was like they were ripped directly from the weekend wrestling shows and somehow inserted into a video game.

"This is unreal!" I thought as I watched them operate.

The game's sound design was also very impressive. Most notably, cleanly produced sound and voice samples could be heard at all times: At the start, Howard Finkel boisterously welcomed you to the game. During the transition scenes in which your chosen wrestler would charge toward the next hurdle, his actual theme song would play (before then, games would use underwhelming MIDI recreations of their themes). As you were battling in the ring, Vince McMahon, the lead commentator, would repeatedly shout his usual insane utterances (like "He's just gone berserk!" and "It's a total debacle!"), and color man Jerry "The King" Lawler (who was a bad guy at the time) would chime in with expectedly heelish remarks (like "What a moron!").

And as I continued to observe and listen to the game's lifelike visuals, music and voice-work, all I could wonder was, "What kind of sorcery did they use to pull all of this off?!"

I was honestly overwhelmed by the enormity of what the developers had achieved here. I couldn't get over how astounding all of it was.

I decided to play as the Undertaker because he was currently one of my favorite wrestlers (and because I was still in my darkness-is-cool phase).

And I loved everything about how he performed as a character: He struck opponents with his trademarked overhand haymaker. He smashed them over the head with physical tombstones. He stunned them with strings of ghostly projectiles. And he grabbed them by the throat with a gliding chokehold, which functioned as an alternate grapple that he could use to stylishly execute moves like his bouncing chokeslam, his vicious neckbreaker, and his feared finisher: the tombstone piledriver.

I was happy to see that the digital version of the Undertaker was just as cool and as awesome as the real-life version!

What made him extra-cool, though, was that he had his own unique covers: He could pin opponents with a single hand or even secure victory simply by raising his arm into the air (because who was going to be foolish enough to tell him that he couldn't win that way?)!

I was really impressed by how he played and functioned. I felt that the designers did a great job of capturing what was so special about him.

And let me tell you: Experimenting with and exploring Wrestlemania's new engine was some of the most fun that I ever had while playing a wrestling game!

I was, admittedly, a bit disappointed with the size of the roster, which totaled a paltry eight characters (compared to Wrestlefest's twelve), and some of the selections that the developers made ("Why would they willingly choose to include Doink when there were probably better options?" I questioned, obviously incognizant of the fact that the WWF's roster was very light on talent at the time), but really, I was so caught up in the moment--so spellbound by what I was seeing, hearing and experiencing--that the game's shortcomings barely registered with me. I gave almost no thought to them.

All I knew, rather, was that I was passionately in love with WWF Wrestlemania. It had captured my imagination in a way that only a few other arcade games ever had. It was bold and creative (and consequently the direct antithesis of what wrestling games had become since the early 90s); it was visually and aurally stunning; and its action was incredibly engaging and fun.

I was firmly in its grasp--so much so that I didn't want to go home anymore. Rather, I wanted to stay at the amusement center and continue playing Wrestlemania all day! (I'm not really sure where, exactly, Dominick was at this point, but I remember that I had a ton of fun explaining to him, in great detail, how the game looked and played.)

August 18th, 1995, was one of the many lousy days that I experienced during that dark period of my life, yeah, but unlike all of the others, it had a glimmer of light to it: a shiny bright spot called WWF Wrestlemania, which provided me a feeling of joy that I desperately needed at the time.

For that and many other reasons, it promptly earned itself a top spot on my list of arcade favorites.

I simply adored it.

WWF Wrestlemania occupied my mind for weeks in following. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I couldn't stop obsessing over its incredible visuals and its spectacularly unique gameplay style.

The only thing that I desired to do was see it and play it again.

"Then why didn't you just go out and play it in one of the local arcades, you silly boy?" you ask while holding up your hands and displaying a confused expression.

Well, the best way for me to answer that question is to repeat what I said in this piece's opening paragraphs (which you obviously glanced over!): I no longer wanted to go anywhere or be around large groups of people. All I wanted to do was stay home and live in my own head.

So there was no getting around the fact that my arcade-going days were basically over.

But still I wanted to play the game. I needed to play it. And in my desperation, as had become tradition, I turned to Nintendo Power with the hope that its pages might one day hold information about a possible home port of one of my favorite new arcade games. I did so with the hope that it would one day speak of WWF Wrestlemania, which I desired to play on my SNES.

Though, my expectations were tempered greatly by my suspicion that the SNES didn't possess the technological horsepower necessary to play host to a game like Wrestlemania, which was obviously highly advanced--much more so than the previous technological standard-bearer: Saturday Night Slam Masters, whose home conversion had to be compromised to a significant degree to run on the SNES (which became clear to me when I started to meticulously compare the two versions).

But still, I convinced myself that it was possible for the SNES to host Wrestlemania by pointing to Donkey Kong Country, whose very existence made me believe that the SNES' hardware probably was capable of reproducing an arcade game that used highly advanced digitization techniques to render its characters and environments. Creating a faithful SNES port of Wrestlemania was, I thought, a simple matter of tapping into the "turbo power" that was hiding somewhere beneath the console's hood.

"Donkey Kong Country's visuals prove that such power exists," I told myself.

The sequence of events that followed was a total repeat of my experience with Slam Masters: Each month, I excitedly pulled the latest edition of Nintendo Power out of the mailbox, brought it up to my room, immediately flipped over to its Pak Watch section, and hoped to find evidence that a port of Wrestlemania was coming to the SNES.

And just like before, I was continuously disappointed. There was never any mention of the game. There were no rumors or anything.

And inevitably I started to resign myself to the idea that Wrestlemania coming to the SNES was a pure pipe dream. "This time," I thought, "it really does appear to be the case that the game's technical specifications are way beyond what the SNES can actually handle."

So, sadly, it appeared as though I wasn't going to get a second chance to play the game I'd been obsessing over for so very long.

But then history repeated itself.

Just as I was preparing to move on and start focusing on other games, it suddenly happened: WWF Wrestlemania showed up out of nowhere in Nintendo Power Volume 79! I saw the first sign of it on the magazine's front cover; its name was displayed in the accompanying "In-Depth" cover line. (This issue's cover image, coincidentally, was Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest.)

And the moment I saw it, I was overwhelmed with excitement!

After locating its name and page number in the index, I quickly and ecstatically flipped over to the page in question and started devouring the out-of-the-blue feature coverage. And I was so overjoyed by what I was reading that I purposely averted my eyes to and ignored troubling details like the intro's revelation that Midway and Acclaim "managed to keep six of the arcade's original eight characters." At the same time, I had to engage in a little bit of self-deception to convince myself that I wasn't disappointed with the port's downgraded graphics (it didn't help that the piece's front page contained a comparative screenshot of the arcade game) and its omission of two characters (Yokozuna and Bam Bam Bigelow).

"Hey, man--it's better than having nothing!" I rationalized.

I mean, despite its having downgraded visuals, it still looked pretty great for an SNES game, and according to the coverage, it played exactly the same as the arcade original. So it had enough of what I wanted to earn my money.

And because the SNES' support was drying up by that point and I was desperate for new games, it made perfect sense for me to purchase WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game (as it was now titled) and do so the moment it hit stores!

So as soon as it hit the market that winter, I ran right out and bought it!

In the first few days that I spent with the game, I was completely entranced by it. It felt so surreal to be playing WWF Wrestlemania, which I'd been dreaming about ever since that day in August, on my TV and in the comfort of my own home. I was looking at and interacting with a very convincing replication of one of the most technologically advanced arcade games in existence.

"This is unreal!" I kept thinking.

And all the while, I had a great time exploring the game's depth and watching its impressively rendered wrestlers execute all of the wild and crazy maneuvers that I was I discovering with my random button-presses.

It was, as I expected, a really fun game.

However, once its spellbinding powers began to diminish, things quickly changed. At that point, I could no longer ignore the game's growing collection of obvious inadequacies, and it became difficult for me to continue denying that the game wasn't anywhere near as awe-inspiring as the arcade original.

It had a lot of problems.

The first was that it simply didn't look as good. Its character sprites were compressed and pixelated, and its textures' shading appeared as though it was sloppily applied with a spray tool.

Also, its strikes and slams weren't quite as thunderous and reverberant. The sound and voices samples were considerably muffled. And the wrestlers didn't have their real music (they went back to using MIDI-composed themes, which, if I was correct, were all lazily ripped from LJN's previous SNES wrestling games)!

Additionally, it felt light on content with its interchangeable "Intercontinental Championship" and "World Wrestling Federation Championship" modes, lack of true tag-team multiplayer, and its painfully limited six-character roster (I became especially annoyed by this deficiency when Dominick informed me that the Genesis version contained all eight characters. "How can a powerhouse console like the SNES be getting a multi-platform game that has less content than the versions released on technologically inferior machines?!" I silently questioned).

And otherwise, its CPU's AI bounced between stupidly pacifistic and obnoxiously aggressive. There was absolutely no in-between!

Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game offered little variety beyond handicapped matches, and consequently I grew bored with it within a week. It just couldn't hold my attention for very long.

Though, because it didn't feel right to abandon a game to which I'd dedicated months-worth of eager anticipation, I forced myself to continue playing it. I figured that if I played it enough, I'd eventually appreciate it more and learn to love it again.

Unfortunately, doing so failed to reignite my interest, and subsequently I got so desperate that I attempted to extract value from the game in any other way that I could. I did things like list all of the wrestlers' moves in my video-game-themed "Superbooks" and, as usual, place them in meticulously drawn giant, symmetrical charts (this of course overlapped with my favorite hobby of neatly arranging characters and items in rows and columns).

But none of it worked. No matter how much I tried, I just couldn't make Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game as engrossing and as I wanted it to be. And at one point, I started to consider the possibility that I was losing interest in the game not because it was a compromised port but rather because its concept simply didn't have lasting appeal.

Because the fact was that I really didn't have a lot of experience with the game before I bought it. I'd only played the arcade original once, and I did so for an hour or two, which was, in retrospect, hardly enough time for me to get a sense of whether or not it had long-term replayability. "So it could be true," I thought, "that I was so preoccupied with the game's striking visuals and breathtaking spectacle that I failed to put a sufficient amount of focus on its action element and thus didn't see potential signs that its appeal was limited."

Eventually I stopped deluding myself and finally accepted the cold hard truth: WWF Wrestlemania simply wasn't that great a game. It wasn't anywhere in the league of WWF Wrestlefest, Saturday Night Slam Masters, or any of the genre's best, most addictively fun games.

So I decided to shelve it and move on to other games.

"What a sad way for this to end," I thought as I slid it back into my game rack for the final time.

The story didn't end there, though, no. It reconvened five years later, in the early 2000s.

At that point, for reasons I don't remember, I decided to give WWF Wrestlemania a second shot. I went out and bought the PC version of the game, which looked to be an arcade-perfect port. "Maybe," I thought, "my opinion of it will change if I play a version of it that more closely matches the arcade original."

But unfortunately, I could barely play the game. It wouldn't recognize two of my Gravis gamepad's buttons, and the gamepad's clunky purple d-pad had so many dead zones that it was ill-suited for inputting directional combos. So all I could do, really, was execute simple strikes and a small number of grapple moves. And playing the game that way was no fun at all. (And there was no chance that I was going to attempt to control the action with a keyboard.)

So I had no choice but to abandon the PC version.

Still, I was so intent on reigniting the flame that I spent weeks hunting down the game's wacky-looking sequel: WWF In Your House, which I was interested in owning because I believed that there was a chance that it improved upon the original's formula and was thus more replayable.

Sadly, though, I couldn't find a copy of it anywhere. And what was strange to me was that retailers weren't even aware that it existed. In every instance, they responded to my inquiries with confused looks and expressions and acted as though I'd just asked them for directions to Jimmy Hoffa's burial site (it was the Deja Vu II: Lost in Vegas situation all over again).

Those full-page ads that I saw in game magazines must have been an illusory, because apparently In Your House wasn't a real game. So I stopped looking for it.

A few years later, I returned to the arcade original when it became available for play on MAME.

But by then, sadly, the magic was gone. The game's realistic visuals no longer captivated me. Its wild, over-the-top action wasn't the compelling hook that I remembered it to be. And getting repeatedly stomped and overwhelmed by multiple CPU players was something that I didn't miss.

"This isn't going to work," I thought to myself in an apathetic manner as I played through the game's separate modes. "This game simply can't hold my attention anymore."

So I went back to playing Wrestlefest (which was also available for play on MAME), which was far more fun and entertaining.

I haven't gone anywhere near WWF Wrestlemania since then.

And that's how it was with WWF Wrestlemania and I. Ours was a relationship that started really strongly but sadly didn't work out in the end. It turned out that we just weren't meant to be together.

That's how it goes, I guess. As time passes, a game's flaws become more and more evident, its sheen dulls significantly, and inevitably your excitement for it fades. Then you have to move on.

But still the memories of the good times always remain.

That's certainly true when it comes to WWF Wrestlemania. Though my relationship with it ended on a sour note, I'll always remember it more for the positive ways in which it affected me. I'll remember it for how it came into my life at a moment when my outlook was bleak and proceeded to uplift me in a big way. At a time when I was in a deep funk and desperately needed a boost, it added some excitement to my life and gave me something to really look forward to.

For as long as I live, I'll never forget how awestruck I was the first time that I saw it, and certainly I won't forget how it brightened up a day that would have otherwise been shrouded in darkness.