From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

WWF WrestleFest - Now That's "Perfect"
There was only one, and I made sure to seek it out in any arcade I visited.

For me, finding a new arcade favorite normally entailed spending a couple of hours moving from machine to machine and doing so until one of the available action games or platformers finally captured my interest. It was a slow process that usually required a lot of experimentation. It was a methodical search.

But then there were those rare and special moments when I'd be leisurely browsing my way through the aisles and suddenly I'd stumble upon an incredible-looking new game and fall in love with it at first sight. I'd be in awe of it. I'd be so entranced by its visuals that all I'd be able to do stand there and stare intently at it and captivatedly observe the action that was being displayed on its monitor. I'd know right away that the game in question was instantly going to become one of my new favorites.

That's how it was when I discovered visually stunning games like Rolling Thunder, Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In each instance, I immediately knew that I'd found my next love. It was truly a magical feeling.

And that's certainly how I felt when I discovered WWF Wrestlefest, whose release was completely unexpected. It just appeared one day. And when I came across it, I was awestruck by what it was displaying. It was the best-looking game I'd ever seen!

I remember the moment well: I was making my usual counterclockwise stroll through the More Fun arcade (or "More for Fun," as my father would mistakenly call it) over at Caesar's Bay Bazaar when suddenly I stumbled upon the WWF Wrestlefest machine. It was in the arcade's middle portion, and it was positioned on the right side of the center pillar--the space that was usually reserved for frantic fighting-type games. The instant I saw it, I stopped in my tracks and became stuck in place. The sheer power of its visuals had left me in a paralyzed state, and the only thing I could do in that moment was raptly gaze upon its beauty.

This game, I already knew, was going to be my new favorite!

As I watched Wrestlefest's attract mode play, all I could think was, "This game looks absolutely incredible!" Visually, Wrestlefest was far superior to WWF Superstars, which, in previous years, I considered to be the benchmark for realistic-looking wrestling games. I was completely blown away by the huge jump in visual quality. I was hopelessly enamored with its large, strikingly lifelike characters; its impressive depth of animation; and its ability to render a huge amounts of action. I mean, there were six wrestlers onscreen at a single time, there was a ton of activity occurring, and, somehow, there wasn't a single instance of slowdown! It was unbelievable!

At that moment, I knew that the next generation of arcade gaming had arrived, and if Wrestlefest was any indication, it was going to be an awesome time!

What I was especially pleased to discover was that Wrestlefest's roster included Mr. Perfect, who was my all-time-favorite pro-wrestler and a personal hero. I loved the guy. I loved what his character represented: being great at everything! Mr. Perfect could do it all; he could make over-the-back three-pointers, hit a home run every time he came to the plate, par any golf course, catch his own 50-yard passes, bowl consecutive perfect games, and outwrestle the best of them. He was a supreme athlete.

My dream, like many other kids', was to be the best at everything I did, and Mr. Perfect embodied that spirit; he was everything I wanted to be. That's why I had such a great fondness for his character.

And I was so happy to finally see him represented in a wrestling game! I couldn't wait to play as him!

Though, I didn't get to play Wrestlefest right away because the machine was already occupied and there was a small line of people in front of me. I had to wait for my turn. In the meantime, I watched series of seasoned arcade-goers play the game and experiment with its mechanics, and I took mental notes and intuited what I could about the game's controls and mechanics.

At the same time, I examined the game's cabinet and took note of the characters that appeared on it. From what I could tell, its roster totaled 12 characters, which was four more than what Superstars had. Returning stars included Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, the Big Bossman and the now-playable Ted Dibiase. The other six were newcomers who, as far as I knew, had never before appeared in a wrestling game.

The list of playable newcomers included Mr. Perfect, whose aptitudes I already talked about. The cerebrally minded "The Snake" Roberts, who engaged opponents using his mastery of ring psychology and the threat of his pet python, Damien, which he'd let loose to slither upon the prone carcasses of his fallen foes. The massive Earthquake, who liked to literally throw his weight around and crush victims with his seated-style Earthquake Splash. Sgt. Slaughter, the patriotic drill instructor who dished out discipline with his feared Cobra Clutch submission hold (at the time, though, he was in the turncoat/Iraqi-sympathizer phase of his career). And Smash and Crush of Demolition--a pair of face-paint-wearing bruisers who showed up to the ring wearing executioner-style leather gear (Crush was the replacement for the original Demolition member Axe, who, rumors said, had recently left the company because of a lingering heart issue).

It was a fine roster, I thought. I was pretty happy with all of the choices. My only disappointment was that the developer didn't bring back "Macho Man" Randy Savage, who was still a huge star, or include rising stars like the Undertaker and Bret Hart. I felt that any of them deserved to get in before Sgt. Slaughter, who was a big wrestling star, yes, but a few notches below any of the aforementioned.

Still, I was eager to play as and experiment with all 10 of the game's playable characters!

Though, I already knew who I was going to select first: Mr. Perfect, of course! In fact, I spent the majority of my first Wrestlefest session playing as him. I had a blast experimenting with him and putting to use all of his signature moves: the snap mare (I was a little bummed that his flipping neck-snap move, with which he'd always follow the snap mare, wasn't included), his showboating standing dropkick, his chest-discoloring knife-edge chop, and his much-feared finisher: the Perfect Plex--a completely inescapable (in theory) variant of the fisherman suplex.

This was the first time I'd ever played a wrestling game in which a character's repertoire included a bridge-style pinning move, and I thought it was cool that the designers made a special adjustment to their game engine just for his sake. I appreciated that effort and what it meant to the character. Mr. Perfect's having an exclusive pinning combination was one of those things that helped him to stand out amongst the other wrestlers.

It was through my Mr. Perfect gameplay that I learned about the makeup of Wrestlefest's anatomy. It was clearly built on Superstars' engine, but it was using a significantly upgraded version of said engine. Wrestlefest's mechanics were more-advanced- and far-more-polished-feeling, and the tweaks that were made helped its action to feel more accessible and more engaging than Superstars'.

The best example was the game's grappling system. It was similar to Superstars' in that it required you to initiate a grapple state through direct contact and then out-mash your opponents to gain control of the grapple, yes, but it did something pleasantry surprising: It gave you a fair chance to win any grapple you voluntarily or involuntarily entered into!

Previously you had to out-mash your opponent within a span of one second to win a grapple, and you were at an immediate disadvantage if you entered into a grapple state involuntarily because the initiating wrestler had some priority. But now you had a window of about four-five seconds to gain control of a grapple, and you could do so by winning a best-2-out-of-3 minigame; the first player to land two punches would win the grapple and get the opportunity to execute a wrestling move. (Naturally the system wasn't quite as fair when you played against CPU opponents, whose actions were more scripted. Sometimes they'd allow for you to maintain momentum and consistently win grapples, sure, but inevitably they'd remember that Wrestlefest was an arcade game and win every grapple just because they could).

The best part was that Wrestlefest expanded upon the system by allowing the lockup's winner to put the opponent in a headlock and drag him around the ring; this allowed you to execute the wrestling move in a desired location and thus strategically establish ring positioning (in a tag match, for instance, you could confine the action to your corner and thus effectively "cut the ring in half" and keep the opponent away from his tag partner). The only catch was that you had a limited amount of time to execute a move; if you held the headlock too long, the opponent would automatically break free and execute a counter move.

"What an amazingly cool addition!" I thought.

Though, nothing demonstrated Wrestlefest's next-level game design as profoundly as its new tag-team-move mechanic: If you dragged a headlocked opponent over to your corner and pressed the red button, you'd tag out and at the same time trigger a tag-team move! Rather than leave the ring immediately, you'd continue to hold the opponent in a headlock, and your partner would automatically climb the nearby turnbuckle and then attack the prone adversary with a flying attack of some kind--with, say, an elbow smash or a double axe handle!

The first time I saw this happen, I thought to myself, "This game is the definition of 'advanced'!" Nothing had ever been more cool.

I also thought that it was incredibly neat that an exiting partner, when he was being controlled by the CPU, would sometimes restrain a downed opponent by holding his legs and thus provide you, the incoming partner, an opportunity to get in a few free stomps!

There were so many of these exciting new additions. There were so many cool little touches. I was constantly discovering them. And during that first session, I kept thinking to myself, "This is the most amazingly deep wrestling game that has ever been made!"

But tag-team attacking was my favorite new mechanic. I loved it because it was fun to do and because it allowed me to execute a cheap new survival tactic. See--whenever you'd use a tag-team attack on an opponent, his partner would automatically enter the ring (even if the partner was human-controlled) and try to break it up, and this was something that you could use this to your advantage. If both of your characters were low on health, it was beneficial, I learned, to goad the opponent's partner into the ring. Doing this would cause a four-man scrum, which was desirable because you were less likely to get pinned or submitted during such a period of chaos.

Wrestlefest's mechanics, I learned over time, were even more exploitable than Superstars', and thus I was able to develop a variety of cheap tricks and shameless survival tactics (all of which I'll talk about later). And because these tactics were so effective, I always felt as though I had a chance to score comeback victories. The situation was never hopeless.

Wrestlefest, in contrast to its predecessor, felt fair, and that was a big part of its appeal. It didn't beat you down and push you away, no. Rather, it did what every great arcade game did: make you feel as though you could endure for long periods of time on just a single quarter. That's one of the reasons why I loved playing it.

Wrestlefest had two gameplay modes. The first was "Saturday Night's Main Event," which occupied the selection menu's secondary slot but was treated as the game's default mode. It was derivative of Superstars' main mode and thus completely tag-team-focused. Though, it wasn't purely iterative; it had some distinguishing features to it. For one, its third contest, excitingly, was fought in a steel cage, which had never before been seen in a wrestling game! I was eager to find out what its addition meant to the game. "What's going to be different about a steel-cage match?!" I wondered, eagerly, when the blue-barred cage came into view.

It turned out, though, that the cage was largely a cosmetic addition. It didn't really change how the action transpired. And I was disappointed about that. I was hoping that its presence signaled the addition of a completely new match type--one in which you could also win by escaping the cage. "That's a missed opportunity," I thought.

Though, the cage did at least add one unique element to the match: You could send your opponent crashing face-first into the cage with an Irish Whip and thus cause him to suffer contact damage! Depending upon who you asked, the cage-collision mechanic was either one of the game's most defining, most ideal gameplay elements or an annoying gameplay quirk that robbed you of the ability to execute your much-counted-upon Irish-whip maneuvers. My opinion was that the mechanic was annoying and served to limit what you could do. After all, I just couldn't be a fan of any mechanic that took away my ability to execute one of my favorite moves: Ted Dibiase's gorgeous-looking, viscerally pleasing scoop powerslam!

My conclusion was that the cage match supplied the tag-team mode a nice bit of visual variety but not much else. It would have been great, I thought, if the game had at least allowed you to climb to the cage's top corners and deliver crazy mile-high dives and splashes. That would have been a spectacular gameplay addition and the best reason to play Saturday Night's Main Event!

In the tag-team mode, your goal was to win the tag-team titles. To do this, you had to beat four other tag teams (all of which were formed from random combinations of the non-selected wrestlers) and then challenge the WWF Tag Team Champions: Hawk and Animal, who comprised the Legion of Doom (and previously the Road Warriors). Their team was basically the equivalent of Wrestlefest's Mega Bucks (Ted Dibiase and Andre the Giant, who served as Superstars' boss duo).

It was always one of our biggest disappointments that you couldn't play as Hawk and Animal. They were such a legendary duo, and we all loved their bruising-, power-style of wrestling. I mean, these were the types of guys you wanted to play as in a high-impact wrestling game! But sadly, the game's developer, Technos, didn't share that opinion. Too bad.

And much like the Mega Bucks, the Legion of Doom would taunt you between matches. The realistically rendered likenesses of Hawk and Animal would appear onscreen and stand there silently and menacingly and thus send you a very clear message. I was honestly amazed by how lifelike they looked. It had always been that character renderings could only be mere approximations because strict screen resolutions served to limit the amount of detail you could add, but then Wrestlefest suddenly came from out of nowhere and hit me with the most uncannily real-looking renderings I'd ever seen in a game. I took this as another sign that something big had happened within the space--that arcade technology had suddenly taken a huge leap.

Also, I thought it was cute how the designers provided a counter to Hawk and Animal's intimidating energy by having an enthusiastic Hulk Hogan, with his goofy smile, encouragingly count down the number of victories you needed to earn a shot. He did this, of course, by punching and shattering the numbered rotary cards (rather than simply flipping them, which certainly isn't something a real man would do!). "Well, at least someone is pulling for me," I'd always think.

As it was with Superstars, you'd have a great chance to succeed if you knew how to string together moves, use strikes to score cheap knockdowns, and successfully employ unscrupulous tactics, like shifting the action outside the ring and battering your opponents with the ring steps (the "1,000-pound steel steps!" as the WWF's hyperbolic wrestling commentators would call them) and TV monitors, which were smaller than the ring steps but still just as damaging.

Taking the action outside the ring and battering opponents with foreign objects was an ideal way to operate because it could help you to win in two different ways. You could use foreign-object attacks to (a) swiftly drain all of your opponent's health and then pin or submit him easily once the action shifted back into the ring or (b) render him immobile at about the 17- or 18-count mark and thus cause him to get counted out.

It was absolutely necessary to use these types of cheap tactics against the Legion of Doom because they, like the Mega Bucks, were supremely overpowered and thus incredibly resistant to conventional tactics (though, thankfully, neither Hawk or Animal was anywhere near as unassailable as Andre the Giant). Both Hawk and Animal had double the amount of health and weighted grapple priority that only grew more favorable as the match went on.

Attempting to beat the Legion of Doom legitimately was a fool's errand and would invariably result in failure. You had to take the action outside the ring and batter them with foreign objects. If you instead tried to whittle away their excessive amount of health with strikes and cheap knockdowns, you'd surely run out of time, since match length was only about two and a half minutes.

So using unscrupulous tactics was the only way to go.

The only other option was to continuously pump quarters into the machine and thus keep restoring your health and resetting the counter. But I never did that because achieving victory by credit-spamming was, I felt, an empty accomplishment. It was better to lose and try again.

Though, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Much of what I said above occurred later on. My first Wrestlefest session was, more simply, all about learning the basics, absorbing knowledge from competing players, and generally being in awe of everything the game was doing. It was all about observing and exploring the most amazing-looking arcade game to come around in years.

And it was a magical experience.

I couldn't leave the arcade that day without trying out Wrestlefest other mode. You know the one I'm talking about: the Royal Rumble. The big draw. The mode that was based on everyone's favorite specialty match. I'd had my eye on it from the start. The whole time, I was dying to play the Royal Rumble mode and find out how it worked!

Saturday Night's Main Event was treated as the game's default mode, yeah, but me and all of the other arcade-goers knew that it really wasn't. We all knew that the Royal Rumble was the game's real main attraction. It was what we were are all hungering to play. That wasn't a knock on Saturday Night's Main Event, no. That mode was great; its action was brilliant. But having the chance to participate in a Royal Rumble--in a frantic multi-man battle royal--sounded far more exciting!

By this point, I was already super-impressed with Wrestlefest. After playing only a handful of tag matches, I was already of the opinion that Wrestlefest was, by a huge margin, the best wrestling game I'd ever played. But then it managed to get even better, and it did so thanks to the Royal Rumble, whose transcendent greatness served to push it into instantly-legendary status.

At first, admittedly, I was a little skeptical of the Royal Rumble mode because I wasn't sure that current arcade technology, even in its advanced state, was powerful enough to reproduce the most necessary aspect of a battle-royal match: large groups of wrestlers in the ring at the same time. Wrestlefest's characters were large and highly detailed, and for that reason, I had a feeling that the game would struggle to render more than four of them at the time. After all: Most modern games struggled to render even three highly detailed characters.

But my fear was allayed the moment the Royal Rumble's action came into view. Right from the jump, Wrestlefest showed its muscle: There were six wrestlers in the ring and absolutely no graphical compromises (no slowdown, sprite-flickering or downscaling). And this was exactly what I was hoping for.

This Royal Rumble was the real deal. It wasn't a cheaply designed 6-man Battle Royal carrying the name of a superior match type, no. It functioned like an actual Royal Rumble! All available wrestlers participated, and when one of the six currently onscreen wrestlers was eliminated, another would come down the aisle and take his place (after cutting a brief ringside promo). And the action would continue until 11 of the 12 participants had been eliminated. Then ring announcer Mike McGuirk would enter the ring and announce the winner.

"This is unbelievable!" I thought to myself after experiencing just a few seconds of Royal Rumble action. "It's amazing that they managed to pull this off!"

I didn't have much success at first because I kept choosing to play as Mr. Perfect, who, I had since come to understand, was the game's "finesse" character, which of course meant that he was the weakest character in the bunch (a fact that was not-so-subtly at hinted by his stature, which was noticeably smaller than every other character's). Naturally I didn't like that my favorite wrestler was slotted as a low-tier character, but I couldn't be mad about it because that's actually how it was for him in real-life wrestling. He was slotted as an upper-mid-card wrestler (and at best a semi-main-eventer) and treated as inferior to megastars like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior.

I thought he deserved better, since he was, you know, perfect! "He should be at the top of the mountain!" I thought. And I was certain that there would come a day when he was firmly in that spot!

Even then, I loved the Royal Rumble's action. I was having a blast with it. Nothing in gaming had ever been more fun.

I have to say, though, that I got really worried when I noticed that the game was allowing for pinfalls and submissions and that they were the only means by which wrestlers were being eliminated. It was supposed to be that wrestlers were eliminated from the Royal Rumble when they were thrown over the top rope and onto the floor; you weren't supposed to be able to pin or submit anyone in a Rumble match. So my immediate fear was that Wrestlefest didn't allow for over-the-top-rope eliminations and that you could only eliminate opponents by pinning or submitting them. "These rules would go completely against the spirit of the Royal Rumble," I thought," and they'd serve to reduce it to a simple, comparatively unexciting tornado-style match."

Though, I soon learned that my assumption was incorrect: At one point, a CPU character picked me up and dumped me out of the ring with a simple body slam. He thus eliminated me and ended my game. And I was happy that it happened because it confirmed that Wrestlefest indeed had over-the-top-rope eliminations. It was worth losing a quarter to find that out. The only thing that annoyed me was that the game didn't allow me to resume the match--to take control of another character--by popping in another quarter. When you were pinned, submitted or tossed, it was over; you had to try again from the start.

Getting tossed out that way taught me an important lesson: Don't position yourself near the ropes. Doing so would make it all too easy for the usual offenders (Hogan, Warrior and Sgt. Slaughter) to scoop you up and cheaply toss you out. Maintaining center position was key.

I was out of luck, though, because Mr. Perfect didn't have a scoop slam, and thus I wouldn't be able to toss people. I'd have to score all of my eliminations via pinfall or submission. That's what I thought until I discovered that backdrops, too, could propel people out of the ring. It happened suddenly: I saw that a wrestler was running at me, I hit the punch button, and I backdropped said wrestler out of the ring. Before then, I assumed that it wasn't possible to backdrop people out the ring because when I tried to do it in Saturday Night's Main Event mode, it wouldn't work; the tossed wrestlers would simply land on the ropes and fall back into the ring.

But it did work, and now I had a very effective tool: I could Irish-whip an opponent and then toss him out with a backdrop (as long as he didn't put up any resistance)! All I had to do was make sure to position myself right up against the ropes. If I was any more than, say, five pixels away, it wouldn't work; the tossed opponent would instead hit the ropes and fall back into the ring.

Now it was a whole new ballgame. I'd discovered Mr. Perfect's true viability: his ability to cheaply toss people out of the ring with backdrops! In the future, I'd use it for the entirety of every Royal Rumble match I was in. I'd toss fools out left and right. Not surprisingly, human players would get pissed at me when I did this to them. One time, I almost got into a fight over it.

As I was leaving the arcade that day, the only thought that was running through my mind was, "That was the best arcade experience I've ever had." I was completely enamored with Wrestlefest. I loved everything about it. And I already considered it to be one of my all-time-favorite video games.

As did Rolling Thunder, Double Dragon and all of the other next-level arcade I discovered, Wrestlefest dominated my thoughts in the next few days. Images of it constantly filled my head. I couldn't stop thinking about all of its awesome new additions and especially the Royal Rumble mode, whose action was fun and addicting to an extreme degree. And I couldn't wait to get back to the arcade and play more Wrestlefest--to spend several hours indulging in the game's heavenly Royal Rumble mode.

Sadly, I don't have any solid memories of my second session with Wrestlefest, but I'm pretty sure that the experience entailed my pumping in quarter after quarter and playing an endless series of Royal Rumble matches as the crafty Mr. Perfect, with whom I'd toss out one non-perfect plebeian after another! And that's pretty much how I interacted with Wrestlefest for years in following. Anytime I was playing it, I'd spend hours competing in Royal Rumble matches, against CPU and human players alike, and trying to achieve victory as many times as I could.

I'd play a few rounds of Saturday Night's Main Event every now and then (and usually pair Mr. Perfect with Jake Roberts, who was another favorite of mine), yeah, but usually my attention was devoted wholly to the Royal Rumble. (Most of the time, I was only playing Saturday Night's Main Event because, in my eagerness to get started, I accidentally pressed the buttons too early and thus didn't give the menu's selector enough time to move leftward.)

Wrestlefest was so amazing, in fact, that it pretty much ruined all other wrestling games for my friends and I. I mean, we still played and enjoyed console wrestling games like WWF Wrestlemania Challenge and WCW Wrestling, sure, but when we compared them to Wrestlefest, we couldn't help but regard them as archaic-feeling. We now wanted more from our wrestling games. That's why I spent every day hoping that the next issue of Nintendo Power would come bearing news that Nintendo's upcoming 16-bit system would be powerful enough to host a game like Wrestlefest and thus bring its type of next-level arcade action to our homes.

And even months later, we continued to be astounded by Wrestlefest's depth and attention to detail. We loved, for instance, how the wrestlers would only use their signature moves when it made the most sense for them to do so. They weren't throwing out finishers willy-nilly, like they did in other wrestling games, no; in Wrestlefest, they'd wait until their opponents' were low on health. That would be the only point in which Jake Roberts would bust out a DDT and Ted Dibiase would apply the Million Dollar Dream submission.

We liked that a wrestler who was completely drained of his health would lie there diagonally rather than horizontally and thus be set up for ground-based finishers like Hulk Hogan's legdrop and the Ultimate Warrior, Big Bossman and Earthquake's respective splashes, all of which were so faithfully replicated that they even had pinning potential.

And it was about time that a wrestling game allowed us to replicate Hulk Hogan's entire match-ending routine. Now we were finally able to deliver a big boot and then deliver a face-crushing legdrop whose setup, like in real life, entailed Hogan's bouncing off the ropes to gain momentum!

Wrestlefest was as authentic as they came, and it was clear to us that its creators had a deep reverence for professional wrestling and its performers.

But still, nothing impressed us more than the Royal Rumble. It was one of the most most brilliantly executed game modes we'd ever played. It gave us everything we could possibly want from an arcade game: Its action was amazingly fun, incredibly satisfying, and super-addicting.

It was true that Wrestlefest had some of the qualities of a quarter-muncher (like weighted CPU priority), yeah, but we honestly never felt deterred by any of them. Rather, because Wrestlefest's mechanics were so exploitable, it was easy to find ways around the game's tilted systems, and doing so was a big part of the fun.

Take the Royal Rumble's strict time-limit, for instance: It didn't have to be an issue. You didn't have to resolve to eliminating all opponents with pins and submissions and put yourself in a position in which it was necessary to continuously refresh the counter by pumping in quarters, no. Instead you could just cheaply toss them out with body slams and backdrops and win in about two minutes! And at the same time, you could utilize all of the exploits I talked about earlier. You could always find ways to get a lot of mileage out of a single credit.

The only thing we found strange was that wrestlers were most at risk of being tossed out of the ring when they had a full-to-three-quarters-full health meter rather than when they were beaten down, which was backwards and kinda unfair (people would get rightfully pissed when they got tossed out five seconds into a Royal Rumble match). Though, we were cool with it because of the advantage it provided: It gave us a way to swiftly and easily eliminate powerhouses like the Ultimate Warrior and Earthquake and the completely overpowered Legion of Doomers--Hawk and Animal, both of whom, like I mentioned earlier, had double the amount of health and insane priority. For us, the benefits outweighed the risk.

When I played as Mr. Perfect, my options were limited, since he, unlike most of the other wrestlers, had only one tossing-type move: the backdrop; and it was difficult to eliminate people with that move because successfully doing so required a lot of calculated movement manipulation (CPU players would likely resist running toward you if you were just standing there). So half of the time, I'd have to rely on other tactics like targeting weakened opponents and picking them off with Perfect Plexes and stealing pins from other wrestlers. Pile-on pins didn't count toward your elimination-total, no, but they were worth going for because they allowed you to stall for a couple of seconds--something you were wise to do when your health was low and the majority of your opponents were fresh. (Though, I'd usually be inclined to break up pin attempts because I wanted all of the eliminations for myself!)

You could say that playing as Mr. Perfect was akin to playing in "hard mode."

Still, it's been a life-long endeavor of mine to complete the "Perfect Run," which entails playing as Mr. Perfect and eliminating all 11 competitors en route to achieving victory. I've been able to pull off "perfect runs" (lowercase) with other wrestlers, but never with Perfect--not during my arcade days or even years later, when I was frequently playing it on MAME. Such runs, I've learned, are only really attainable with a specific type of wrestler: one whose repertoire includes both a backdrop and a body slam. I'm talking about wrestlers like Hogan, Warrior and Crush.

So that's how it goes: I use wrestlers like Crush to achieve perfect runs and Mr. Perfect to engage in not-so-perfect runs.

It's ironic, I guess.

In the arcade days, I wasn't able to hear or get a sense Wrestlefest's music, because the arcade cacophony would always drown it out. Yet, still, the game's sound design managed to be incredibly memorable because of the power of its wonderfully immerse sound effects. Wrestlefest was one of those games that could capture your attention on the strength of its sounds, alone. Every one of its moves had a satisfying palpable impact. Each of its screen-shaking suplexes, piledrivers and powerslams was accentuated by a strikingly violent, highly reverberant slam that sounded like a large crate being dropped into a room whose surfaces were made of solid steel.

The game's thunderous, viscerally pleasing sound effects were a big part of its appeal. They drew you to it. And they were so resounding that could hear them a mile away. If an arcade had a Wrestlefest machine, you'd know it immediately; your ears would detect its amazingly alluring slamming sounds the moment you entered the place.

There was also another very memorable aspect of the game's sound design: its voicework and particularly the unseen commentator who could be heard calling out the name of each move and the wrestler who executed it (though, naturally he had trouble keeping up with the action in Royal Rumble matches, whose action was much more hectic). His calls helped to enhance the action. He'd make the simple act of climbing the turnbuckles appear more dramatic by excitedly shouting something like, "Warrior's on the top rope!" And his enthusiastic calls would further accentuate the impact and visceral appeal of slams, suplexes and piledrivers.

His presence was certainly an essential ingredient.

As an aside: I remember that certain arcade-goers believed, for whatever reason, that the commentator was referring to Hulk Hogan as "Toaster" rather than "Hulkster." And I feel that it's necessary for me to correct the record and tell you, reader, that this isn't the case. Hulk Hogan is not a toaster.

Though, it is true that he sometimes looks like he just popped out of one.

"So where does WWF Wrestlefest place in your gaming hierarchy?" you ask with great curiosity.

Well, I consider Wrestlefest to be my second-favorite arcade game of all time and my favorite wrestling game, period. I absolutely adore it. And my fellow arcade enthusiasts must have loved it just as much as I did because it wound having great longevity. It never really disappeared from arcades; it became less ubiquitous over the years, sure, but that was more so a consequence of the arcade sector's rapid decline. But even then, it had a constant presence. Hell--I was still coming across Wrestlefest machines in amusement parks, family entertainment centers, and golfing ranges as late as the mid-2000s! That should tell you all you need to know about the game's quality and entertainment value.

And in my opinion, it's still the best arcade wrestling game ever made. No other wrestling-themed arcade game is able to top it. Wrestlefest was and continues to be the king!

It's just too bad that Wrestlefest (and all of the WWF's other arcade wrestling games) will probably never be re-released because of licensing issues. It's a shame because old-school enthusiasts would love to have convenient access to it, and modern audiences would probably love it because of how simple and accessible it is.

THQ recently released an imitative Wrestlefest sequel for the iPhone (its roster includes modern stars like Steve Austin, The Rock, John Cena, Randy Orton, and Rey Mysterio), but unfortunately it wasn't well-received. It didn't capture the original's spirit, people say. So maybe that should inspire THQ and the WWE to do something radical: stop trying to replicate the irreplicable and find a way to release the original!

The gaming world would thank you for doing so.

I have to say, though, that I get a bit bummed whenever I see the title screen's character composite because it reminds me that more than half of this game's roster is now deceased. What's worse is that every time I revisit the game, it seems, another of its wrestlers is gone. Consequently, Wrestlefest has developed (for other reasons as well) a rather sobering quality: It always serves to remind us of all of the great things that have sadly disappeared from our lives over the last 25 years.

Though, my being able to access and enjoy Wrestlefest in the current day and consistently engage with a community who adores the game as much as I do is proof that great things never actually die, no. When they touch our lives in the way they do, their spirit lives on forever.

So let's hear it for WWF Wrestlefest: one of the most enduring wrestling games ever made.

It's not just one of the best, I tell you.

It's absolutely ... perfect. [spits out and slaps gum]