Rock’n Wrestle – “He knows all the moves”

The Way of the Exploding Fist was early enough and good enough to be ahead of the trend on martial arts and fighting games and to be a huge success. It was the UK’s best-selling game of 1985, and a wave of similar games soon followed. As more of those took off, there was a big opportunity for Melbourne House and its development sub-label Beam Software to further capitalise. It was no surprise that Fist’s lead programmer Gregg Barnett went on to another fighting game. This time, though, he would take inspiration from a different sport to karate. He and his team set out to make a game based on professional wrestling. More than that, they wanted to produce “the first truly three-dimensional combat game”. It was an ambitious swing that would have mixed results.

Once again, the main cited inspiration was the real-life sport itself. It’s also notable in the context of The Way of the Exploding Fist taking heavy inspiration from Technos’s Karate Champ that one of the more prominent of the few professional wrestling games to exist before Rock’n Wrestle was also by Technos. They released the arcade game The Big Pro Wrestling (aka Tag Team Wrestling) in 1983. Rock’n Wrestle doesn’t look like The Big Pro Wrestling, but it’s not hard to imagine Barnett and Melbourne House surveying Technos’s other arcade games when coming up with concepts. Technos also followed that up in late 1985 with the Taito-published Exciting Hour: The ProWrestling Network (aka Mat Mania), although that was almost certainly too late to have been an inspiration on Rock’n Wrestle.

Thanks to its wrestlers being able to move in directions other than left and right, the diagonals can’t be used for attacks in the same way as The Way of The Exploding Fist. That reduces the number of basic moves on offer at any time, something compensated for by adding a lot of contextual moves for different situations like grabs and lifts. That brings the total number of moves up to 24. “Control of your Rock’n Wrestle wrestler is tricky” observed Your Computer’s reviewer. “It is no game for lazy players” said Commodore User, though they followed that with “it is this variety of potential moves that sets the game apart”. I certainly found it very much harder to get used to than Exploding Fist. Melbourne House felt the need to try to pre-emptively reassure players in the manual, saying that “though looking at the demo game may have given you the impression that Rock’n Wrestle is a complex game to play, nothing is further from the truth.”

Not everyone was convinced by this, and Rock’n Wrestle didn’t get anything like the following of Exploding Fist, entering the charts at #1 but falling pretty fast. Before the end of the year, Zzap!64 were interviewing Gregg Barnett and asking him about what a disappointment it was. “Well yes. That seems to be what the British press thought” he replied, perhaps with Zzap!64’s own 53% “what a disappointment!” review in mind. “Some people can’t get into the game, others persevere and find it great” he offered. “Perhaps we tried to be too innovative, what with all the moves and 3D movement in and out of the ring.” He also blamed the lower popularity of professional wrestling in Britain at a time when it hadn’t taken off as it would soon enough.

There aren’t any real world wrestlers in Rock’n Wrestle. In the same interview Barnett mentions a rejected suggestion to get an endorsement from a British wrestler, although it’s not clear whether that would have involved putting them into the game. Instead, Rock’n Wrestle has a cast of somewhat visually distinctive characters with different heads and different coloured leotards. Superficially, offering a variety of characters fitted in with the direction Yie Ar Kung-Fu had pushed fighting games in with its popularity. That game’s characters were built around different fighting approaches, though, generally named after their weapon and with their appearance following on from that. Rock’n Wrestle’s wrestlers may each have some visual personality, but they are no more different in practice than Exploding Fist’s karateka in red was different from its karateka in white.

The characters aren’t particularly like Yie Ar Kung-Fu’s in concept either. In an approach that is more than familiar from later successful fighting games, they are instead an array of national, racial and subcultural stereotypes. Redneck McCoy; Molotov Mick; Angry Abdul; a punk called Vicious Vivian, a Native American called Flying Eagle. The final, strongest fighter you have to defeat is Lord Toff, who wears a bowler hat and, the manual tells us, believes that “the British Empire will come again and he’ll do his part when the time comes”. Meanwhile, in a game where Gregg Barnett was once again joined by Greg Holland as the graphics lead, they decided to give the blond player character the name Gorgeous Greg.

Instead of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, the progenitor for this approach may be Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! games, with their 1984 arcade game Super Punch-Out!! featuring opponents including Bear Hugger from Canada, Vodka Drunkenski from Russia, and Dragon Chan from Hong Kong. They do differ from each other in how they fight, but there is much more of an emphasis on their appearance and origins. Gregg Barnett may have played Super Punch-Out!! at the arcades alongside Karate Champ, but even if he didn’t there is an even more obvious route for it to have become an inspiration. Namely, the UK’s sixth best-selling game of 1985, Frank Bruno’s Boxing, released on formats including Barnett’s favoured Commodore 64. 

Frank Bruno’s Boxing, made by Elite, is Super Punch-Out!! with the identifying details barely sanded off. It includes the same three characters mentioned above but with new names, together with a handful of Elite’s own creations from scratch. Along the way they managed to significantly outdo Nintendo for racism. They changed Dragon Chan to Fling Long Chop and simultaneously decided that he was now from Japan; one of their new boxers is called Tribal Trouble and where all of the others have their home country listed, for him it just says “Africa”. In that context, let’s say that at least Rock’n Wrestle only landed up about equally as bad as the original Super Punch-Out!!. In reviewing Rock’n Wrestle, both Commodore User and Computer & Video Games made reference to The Village People, which feels fairly apposite.

As well as the complexity of the controls, some reviews complained about the graphics of Rock’n Wrestle. Commodore User noted that they were not as crisp as The Way of the Exploding Fist. “The sprites are crude in both their definition and animation” said ZZap!64’s Gary Penn. Nigel Spencer, who worked on Rock’n Wrestle as his first role at Beam and Melbourne House, later reported that when making it they “were so tight on memory we even put data in the black areas of the in-game screen.” That’s another indication that it was perhaps a stretch too far for its time.

Gregg Barnett and Beam Software would return a few years later to have another go at wrestling. Mindscape signed them up to make an official licenced game featuring a professional wrestler, Sgt. Slaughter. At the time he was with the American Wrestling Association, in between stints with the World Wrestling Federation. The resultant game, Sgt. Slaughter’s Mat Wars, did not reach the UK charts. That wasn’t even the worst of it, as Gregg Barnett later told it. When the publisher Acclaim were looking for a developer for an official WWF game for the NES, a rather more potentially lucrative proposition, they initially thought of Beam thanks to Rock’n Wrestle. However, on discovering Beam’s existing commitment to making a game based on someone from a rival series, there was no way Acclaim could give it to them. Rare got the gig instead, and made the first WWF WrestleMania game. Beam’s status as a wrestling game pioneer failed to pay off.

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Sources:

• Beam Software: Interview with Gregg Barnett, ACMI, 2006
• From Hungry Horaces to Exploding Fists, Gary Penn, Zzap! 64 No. 18, October 1986
• Interviews: Nigel Spencer / Beam Software, Melbourne House, Andreas Wallström, C64.com, 2011
• Exploding Fist tops Gallup 1985 charts, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 5 No. 12, 20-26 March 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Scene: Rock’n Wrestle, E.L., Commodore User No. 29, February 1986, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Software shortlist: Rock’n Wrestle, Your Computer Vol. 6 No. 3, March 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Zzap test: Rock’n Wrestle,  Zzap!64 No. 12, April 1986, accessed via Def Guide to ZZap!64
• Software reviews: Rock’n Wrestle, Computer & Video Games No. 53, March 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive

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