Last Friday, the Padinga staff sat down to a meeting. And while E3 and its impending awesomeness was certainly on our minds, conversation kept slipping back to mourning. Yes, friends, Macho Man Randy Savage passed away that day, and we were all certainly grief stricken. At the age of 58, Randy Savage suffered a heart attack while driving, which resulted in a fatal car crash.
So, let us remember the ways of Macho Man Randy Savage. Not only was he a ten time world champion of pro wrestling, not only was he the purveyor of many a Slim Jim beef snack to junkfood advocates the world over, not only does he have one of the greatest rap albums of all time, not only was he the voice of Rasslor on the cartoon Dial M for Monkey… but he was also a video game character.
That’s the Macho Man we’ve come to celebrate today, friends. Star of 18 video games on nearly every system since the NES, here is a retrospective of his digital career. A piece of immortality…
Wrestling games. You love ’em, I love ’em. Or, well, I love some of them. There were just a ton of those bastards coming out during the PSX/N64 era, and most of them sucked pretty hard. Slow, choppy, blocky. Happily, Macho Man wasn’t really in many of those, so I just have to worry about covering the awesome ones from the bit-wars era, and the arcade versions. Somewhere between sports games and fighting games lay these strange and awesome hybrids, many of them touched by the greatness of Randy Savage. I can’t possibly cover all 18 of them… or rather, I won’t… but here are the highlights:
Appearance #1: Micro League Wrestling, 1987, Commodore 64
Weird. This is the first WWF licensed game, and thank God none of the others have tried to use the same formula since. This is a turn-based game where you can be either Hulk Hogan or Macho Man, and you enter in attack commands hoping to do hit-point damage to your opponent. The game is animated with a series of flip-book like pictures that kind of go with the move you just pulled off, along with a few oddly-timed pictures of Miss Elizabeth, Macho Man’s wife and manager.
I guess people were easy to impress in 1987, there were like 3 sequel discs. Final Fantasy Tactics it ain’t.
Appearance #2: WWF Wrestlemania, 1988, NES
There’s nothing real impressive about this game, but I did play the holy hell out of it when I got in for Christmas back in the 80’s. There was a slim 6 wrestlers to choose from, fan favorites like Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Honky Tonk Man, and of course, the Macho Man.
Basically you walked around the ring punching the shit out of each other until someone’s life bar was totally depleted, and then you’d hit both buttons to do a pin. Matches could go on forever, as power-ups specific to each character would zip across the ring perpetually, but only when your theme music was playing. The game would alternate midi themes for each active wrestler. You could also button mash to jump off the top rope or throw each other across the ring, so that was cool.
The most interesting thing to me, from a game design standpoint, is that some of the characters were just programmed to be better than the others. Game balance was tossed right out the window. Ted Dibiase was just a huge pussy, slapping you in the chest for virtually no damage, where as one hit from fan-favorite Hulk Hogan would instantly down any character other than Andre the Giant. Macho Man was #3 on the power chart.
Appearance #3: WWF Superstars, 1989, Arcade
Jesus-God, this game was awesome. Finally, this is what I’m talkin’ about. This game came out shortly after Wrestlemania III, when Randy Savage won his first WWF World Championship, and was more or less based on the feud that he and Hulk Hogan had against “The Mega Bucks”, Ted DiBiase and Andre the Giant, who were the final bosses. The game had six playable characters, this time adding Ultimate Warrior and Big Boss Man to the roster. You controlled one tag-team, or you and a friend could team together, and play through a couple of tag matches to try and wrest the belt, and probably the honor of Miss Elizabeth, from Andre and co.
This was a great arcade button masher, complete with a pretty simple, tiered grapple system, and the ability to jump outside of the ring and beat each other up with steel chairs. This was about everything an 8-year-old wrestling fan could want at the time, and I recall spending many an evening in Gambino’s Pizza dropping quarters into this thing with my friends.
Appearance #9: WWF Royal Rumble, 1993, SNES and Genesis
After a few more NES games of moderate improvement and a few terrible, old school Gameboy Games, finally the 16-bit era served up some Macho goodness. LJN had a trilogy of pretty solid wrestling games, the first of which was Super Wrestlemania. My beef with that title is that they licensed out a large number of WWF characters, but then split them up between the two consoles. While Macho Man and Hulk Hogan were on both, if I wanted to play with Ultimate Warrior, I had to have the Genesis version, but The Road Warriors were only on the SNES. This title also had differing rosters, but most of the big names were on both cartridges, and the roster was notably bigger.
New and cool features on this game included being able to knock out the ref, and then gaining access to a new set of illegal moves, like eye gouging. Each character also had their own signature move, which was pretty unique at the time. The Royal Rumble was the big draw here, with potentially the entire twelve-man roster being in the ring at the same time. The goal was to beat each other down, do some tug-of-war ring dominance maneuvers, and try to toss each other out over the top rope…. well, that was the idea, anyway, as a kid I discovered a cheap-ass two move combo that could toss even the mighty Yokozuna out like it was nothing. Pretty easy after that. My friends hated me.
Fun fact: In this game, and any before it, at least 50% of the wrestlers appearing in it are dead, and half of the remainder are born-again Christian televangelists. Hulk Hogan will outlive them all.
Appearance #12: WWF Royal Rumble Pinball, 1994
Macho Man was on the board, and there might have been a little voice clip or two for him in this game. There were a bunch of wrestlers just pictured for you to shoot and make a ‘tag team bonus’.
Mostly, the pinball game seemed to center around Doink the Clown. He had the biggest bonus of 25 Million if you shot the really tiny space he was ‘hiding’ in. Why did anyone ever think Doink the Clown was a popular wrestling character? I hated that goddamn clown. And yet, there were 4 iterations of him, and a series of clown midgets he used to tag-team with. Sometimes, Kayfabe, you go too far.
Appearance #14: Virtual Pro Wrestling 64, 1997, N64
What the hell? I have never gotten my hands on this game, its only in Japan, and no way would it have ever flown in the US… its just too incredible! Not that the gameplay is great, its that damn WCW game engine that I hate so much, but the roster is enormous! It has all the WCW and NWO wrestlers of the time, plus a bazillion Japanese wrestlers, and a ton of old school superstars that were still owned by the WWF at the time. Also on board, strangely, is a bunch of UFC guys before that license blew up on its own.
You want to see Macho Man take on Ken Shamrock? Its only here.
Appearance #17, WCW Mayhem, 1999, N64 and PSX
By this point, the halcyon days were behind us. Macho Man had divorced from Miss Elizabeth, and he and Hogan had left the WWF after disagreements with management, to go invade WCW. During that era, Macho Man appeared in 5 WCW games on the PSX and N64. Mayhem was the last, and arguably best, of those games, sporting an impressive 55 man roster.
The gameplay is slow, its clunky, its boring. At least, I think so. This is that weird middle era of games where the 3D characters are all in early development, and are just freakish looking, and the control system, trying to simulate grapples and power struggles, is really slow and unresponsive. The system, trying to simulate the back and forth power struggle dynamics of a real match, allow matches to go on for hours if you let them. Seriously, this thing is no fun.
The games got better on the Xbox, where you could program your own moves and the action sped up a bit… but Macho Man was retired by then. Happily, you can recreate him in the custom wrestler generator. Sound bits must be simulated by the player, however. OOOH YEEEAAH!
Appearance #18, WWE All Stars, 2011, Ps3, 360, Wii
After years of absences, caused by WWE buying up all the other wrestling federations and then continuing to feud with him, Macho Man finally returns to video games.
This one is pretty fun… a statement that seriously belies my bias towards arcade style wrestling games over simulations. But really, its a quick, easy to play beat-em-up, with a good number of characters and moves. The gameplay is almost too simplistic, in a way that defeats replay value, but really, if you just want to pop in a game and do some elbow drops off the top rope without an hour of button mashing through a grapple first, here’s your game. Its like the NBA Jam of wrestling games, with big guys like Andre the Giant kicking Rey Mysterio, literally, out of the ring and into the audience.
And so, with that, we conclude our tour of the Macho Man’s various video game appearances. There’s still plenty more out there to be discovered, and maybe a few more to come in the future, as part of the All Stars series.
We can all be thankful, though, that Macho Man was called up to heaven when he was, his first act in the afterlife being to prevent the Rapture with one mighty Elbow Drop. Oooh YEAH! DIG IT!
