So I'm going to threadjack a little bit here to talk about a recent find of mine.
It's no secret that the 8 bit era of gaming wasn't great in terms of wrestling games. Yes, there were some gems like Tecmo World Wrestling and Pro Wrestling (A WINNER IS YOU!) that were classics, but the officially licensed games were kind of garbage. WWF games in particular were all kinds of smashed ass, but there was one licensed game that was pretty decent:
That's right, World Championship Wrestling. It was released in 1990, and featured what was for the time a fairly large roster:
It's not a great game by any means, but as far as wrestling games on the NES that feature actual people you've heard of it's not bad. The controls are kind of stiff, but the main complaint most people have is that it's hard as balls. Not in a cheap way, but that level of difficult that only seems to exist in NES games. The game play is pretty straightforward, you pick your guy, choose from a list of moves your guy can perform, and have at it.
As you can see, graphically it's not bad for an 8 bit game. Light years beyond what WWF games at the time were serving up, for sure. There was always one thing that bothered me: The guys in this game didn't seem to have the right moves in the game.
Since when did Ric Flair use a Jumping Neck Breaker Drop? Imagine my surprise years later when I found out the reason why no one has the right move is because FCI (the company who made the game) just went back and copied a wrestling game released in 1988 for the Famicom:
SuperStar Pro Wrestling was the name of the game, and it featured Japanese legends like Giant Baba, Akira Maeda, Bruiser Brody, and Abdullah the Butcher. There was one clever inside joke, the boss of the WCW game was a large masked wrestler named WCW Master who had height and weight in the game very similar to the real life proportions of Andre the Giant. Indeed, the boss of SuperStar Pro Wrestling was Andre, and as it happens WCW Master's mask was very similar to the one worn by the Giant Machine in the WWF. Of course the gag was when the Giant Machine was in the WWF, everyone acted like they didn't know who it could be under the mask when there was only one person it could possibly be given the size. So it can be taken as a wink to the knowing wrestling fan playing the game who this boss guy is supposed to be.
(video of someone on YouTube beating Andre as Vader)
I was able to track down SuperStar Pro Wrestling recently, and it's really a fun game to play. If you played the WCW game as a kid, it's exactly the same control wise, even the music is identical. It's definitely worth tracking down if you have a way of playing Famicom games, or even on an emulator if you prefer that way.