This Week in Retro: WWF No Mercy [2000] (Patreon)

November 17, 2000: 20 Years Later, We Can Still Smell What AKI Was Cookin'

by Diamond Feit

Hot take: Professional wrestling is real. 

I'm well aware it's not a "sport" in the same way that baseball or rugby are sports—professional wrestling has scripted storylines, and the outcome of every match is more or less predetermined—but whatever their exaggerated personas or backstories may be, professional wrestlers are real people performing real stunts all year round. You can watch it on television, or on the internet, or live in person, and you'll see actual human beings risk their personal safety to put on a show for your benefit. They will pull their punches. They will feign incapacitation when necessary. But every leap or collision has a real impact on their bodies, and they deserve the same level of safety and labor protection that other professional athletes are afforded.

WWF No Mercy is not real. It is a video game, one released 20 years ago this week, when the World Wrestling Federation stood at its highest possible profile. In the year 2000, the WWF was airing six hours of programming on cable television each week, in addition to touring around the world and hosting monthly pay-per-view events which drew hundreds of thousands of viewers at $30 a pop. WWF wrestlers—who have always been referred to on-air as "superstars"—lived up to their name as they flexed their celebrity muscles by appearing on all manner of media at the time. When Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson hosted Saturday Night Live on March 18, 2000, he was joined by multiple other superstars as well as Vince McMahon, the longtime owner of the WWF. If you're handing over the keys to one of America's most revered comedy institutions to a professional wrestler, why settle for one guest star when you could have five?

Video games and professional wrestling have gone hand-in-hand since both rose to popularity in the 1980s, and both mediums lend themselves to over-the-top action. There's also an economical aspect to professional wrestling that gives it an advantage over other sports titles: A baseball team has nine players per side; a basketball team has five. But an entire wrestling match only requires two human figures to be on screen in a square-shaped arena, which was a simple task for early video game developers to achieve (see also: Boxing).

By the late 1990s, both video games and wrestling had come a long way, and both had intense competition to thank. What had been largely a stand-alone show in the 1980s (Nintendo dominated consoles while the WWF dominated televised wrestling) had grown into a splintered landscape. The console wars had pushed video games through multiple hardware generations to the point that home systems were now capable of generating nearly-realistic-looking human beings with actual voices. Likewise, the so-called "Monday Night Wars" between the WWF and WCW drew millions of viewers each week as the rival factions tried to out-do one another with bigger, broader events, all while each company tried to poach talent from the other.

Enter Japanese developer AKI. Under the name "The Man Breeze," AKI had created Virtual Pro Wrestling for the original PlayStation in Japan in 1996: A game full of nearly-real wrestlers using phony monikers like "Andy the Gigante" to avoid legal issues. That game would end up published abroad by THQ as WCW vs. the World, adding recognizable talent to the pool of phony grapplers. When Virtual Pro Wrestling's sequel hit Nintendo 64, a licensed version again shipped overseas, this time called WCW vs. nWo: World Tour. That game sold so well that AKI was hired to make a direct sequel exclusively for foreign markets, called WCW/nWo Revenge, one with arenas and entrance music based on real WCW programming at the time. When Revenge outsold every other game in America in October 1998 (surpassing even Metal Gear Solid), it was clear that AKI had sniffed out a magic formula that won gamers over.

In a move that perfectly fit the nature of the wrestling business at the time, the WWF ended their long relationship with Acclaim to make a deal with THQ in order to have AKI jump ship from making WCW games to making WWF games. WWF Wrestlemania 2000 (released, naturally, in 1999) would be the first such game. It flew off store shelves, moving a million copies during the holiday season. One year later, AKI produced the company's fifth pro wrestling game in as many years (or eighth, if you count Virtual Pro Wrestling games separately from their international editions) with the release of WWF No Mercy.

In a sense, WWF No Mercy is less of an original game than a refinement of what AKI had established as a multi-million-copy-selling wrestling game formula. Far too many developers treated wrestling games like an offshoot of fighting games: Wrestlers could punch and kick each other or input special moves to wear down an opponent's life bar before going for a pin. In the AKI games, the system mimics the flow of actual pro wrestling in that wrestlers have "spirit" bars that rise and fall as the action unfolds. Taunting your opponent or appealing to the crowd is just as valuable to your spirit as delivering a pile driver. One wrestler can take an early lead and land a few power moves to make their spirit soar, enabling them to use a signature special attack on their opponent—to the fans' vocal delight. However, even as their spirit craters, it's always possible for a battered wrestler to turn the tide back in their favor with a few key reversals, pumping up their spirit in turn and setting themselves up for a surprise comeback.

WWF No Mercy, as with previous AKI titles, makes perfect use of the awkwardly-shaped Nintendo 64 controller, setting the large A & B buttons to strikes or grapples and the L & R buttons to blocking or dodging. Players can hold the block button to shrug off punches or kicks forever, but they'll remain vulnerable to grabs this way. Dodging evades grabs, but in tight spaces, a strike can't be dodged. For advanced players, a well-timed block or dodge will actually counter a strike or grab, but only if they correctly anticipate which type of attack is coming. This balance of offense versus defense, combined with the see-saw spirit meter, means that a quality WWF No Mercy match can last as long as a real pro wrestling match and be just as entertaining.

WWF No Mercy is an excellent wrestling game, but there is one more reason it remains beloved 20 years later: It was AKI's last pure wrestling game. A planned sequel, WWF Backlash, was cancelled. While THQ would continue to distribute WWF wrestling games until the publisher folded in 2013, none of the subsequent games were developed by AKI. AKI would later incorporate their time-tested wrestling formula into two unusual 2003 GameCube releases: Def Jam Vendetta and Ultimate Muscle: Legends vs. New Generation. Both games contain the raw DNA from their N64 predecessors while replacing professional wrestlers with real-life hip-hop performers and licensed anime characters, respectively.

AKI would continue to develop Def Jam and anime wrestling games for a few more years until departing the genre altogether, jettisoning their corporate moniker as well. Today the company still exists, but it is known as syn Sophia, and their primary output is fashion-centered games aimed at young girls. Meanwhile, the WWF has been called WWE since 2002 and has absorbed its largest competitors from the 1990s, but the company has struggled with video game development in recent years. WWE2K20 was so poorly received that a sequel that had been planned for release this year was scrapped.

However, wrestling and video game fans had reason to be excited again as just one week ago, All Elite Wrestling announced AEW Games, an initiative to develop new video games with input from WWF No Mercy director Hideyuki Iwashita. In a world where sports games are churned out year after year and few if any fans know who is responsible for their creation, I find it heartwarming that one wrestling game in particular (along with the name of its director) holds such cachet with fans 20 years after its release. In fact, AEW star Kenny Omega counts himself amongst said fans; he was 17 years old when WWF No Mercy came out.

I don't know enough about AEW or Hideyuki Iwashita to start getting hyped about a promised return to the glory days of AKI, but I do think it's high time wrestling organizations figured out a way to turn back the clock to an era when wrestling video games held wide appeal. WWF No Mercy is a game that was obviously made with wrestling fans in mind, but it has such sound mechanics and a robust character that you don't have to know Too Cool from Too Much to enjoy it. Sure, the wrestlers' faces look freakish by modern standards, the ring introduction videos are choppy animated GIFs, and the audio samples are of such low quality it sounds like Stone Cold Steve Austin is breaking glass underwater. 

But those technical shortcomings don't amount to a hill of beans when the core gameplay is still exciting to engage with two decades later! Hell, there remains a vibrant, active community of No Mercy fans to this day who mod and update the original game with higher-resolution textures, new modes of play, and even new wrestlers who were never in the WWF to begin with! THQ is long gone, and AKI isn't even AKI anymore, so I say anyone with the least bit of curiosity should get out there and experience this two-decade-old licensed video game any way you can! It's not like Nintendo is going to release a Nintendo 64 Mini with games from a defunct publisher included! And even if they would, which they won't, does literal billionaire Vince McMahon need or deserve your money at this point? HELL NO, AND THAT'S THE BOTTOM LINE, CAUSE DIAMOND FEIT SAID SO!!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.