Long-running #1 games, ones getting past a month at the top, are a thing that happens reasonably frequently. In 2000, the runs of three games at the top hit the two month mark, which was a bit more unusual. More than half of the year, 29 weeks, was ruled over by those three games alone. They all represented phenomena which went beyond games. One was Pokémon, with a cross-media explosion I’ve already discussed. One was a TV game show in its third year and regularly gaining more than 10 million viewers. The other, slightly more puzzling one, was WWF Smackdown!.
It’s not puzzling because wrestling wasn’t popular here. It was. It’s just that it was very popular in 1998 too, its Attitude Era transformation already underway. Yet Acclaim’s WWF: Warzone, while it reached #1, didn’t have anything like the same impact. Unlike 2000’s other biggest games, this wasn’t a case of a new phenomenon, or a phenomenon newly being turned into a game. Its developers just found a way of making it appeal that much more than what went before.
I rather liked WWF: Warzone, its to-the-point presentation and the strategic back-and-forth of its matches. By comparison, my first impression of WWF Smackdown! was of garish unlikeability and overly simple fighting. But then I’m not a wrestling fan, and more time with it revealed my first impressions to be a little unfair.
Each match starts with full screen intro FMVs for each wrestler with the in-game version of said wrestler walking out in front of them, polygonal approximation imposed on human. It’s certainly an eye-catching and committed way to go. And it’s representative of a dedication to a certain kind of spectacle. Camera angles rapidly change to give you a better view of throws, and they’re easy to pull off to make sure you get plenty of chance to do that.
WWF: Warzone had a set of multi-button combos for each character to do a range of specific moves. WWF Smackdown! strips it back to one button + one direction per move, with distinct variations between types of characters. It takes away almost all of the different health bars and statuses, going down to just one bar and a set of lights, one of which comes on each time the bar reaches the top. The simplicity makes for quicker matches with less satisfying strategy, but it also leaves room for other elements to shine.
WWF Smackdown!’s season mode and range of matches within it is its most impressive element, making your chosen character feel like just a small part of a wider show going on. There aren’t a lot of narrative elements, but even the limited, wordless interactions between characters add a lot more life than the canned commentary remarks which it is thankfully without. If you choose a character within a minority group of wrestlers, like a woman or a European, you will get a very small and repetitive selection of matches within your niche, but even then the different modes liven things up. The one where you have to grab a microphone and hold it in your opponent’s face until they say they give up is particularly effective in its daft simplicity.
There is something about how fully realised and how different WWF Warzone! is which is easy to ascribe to its background. American publisher THQ made a simple move which is maybe more unusual than it should be – they signed up a Japanese developer who had already made successful wrestling games, just mostly only within Japan. Their bet that the half decade of experience that Yuke’s had would be easily applicable to WWF turned out to be very well-founded. Their better-developed take on a popular entertainment was enough for eight weeks at #1.
WWF Smackdown! spent eight weeks at the top of the UK games chart. Click through to the next page for what was topping other charts at the time: