Day 27: WCW, NWO, and Wrestling Video Games
Dead man walking
My relationship with professional wrestling ebbed and flowed in the 90’s. I was introduced to it through my cousin in late 1993 when he invited me over on a Sunday night, a school night, to watch WCW Starrcade. My parents obliged for some strange reason and we were allowed to stay up eating nachos and watching grown men nearly bludgeon each other to death, or at least I believed at the time. The main event between Ric Flair and Big Van Vader is burned into my memory because I thought I was about to watch a man die. Ric Flair was beaten on by Big Van Vader so badly that at 8 years old I was ready to sneak out of my cousin’s bedroom where we were watching to call the cops on everyone: him for inviting me, my parents for letting me, his parents for paying for it, and Big Van Vader for attempted murder. My perception at that time was that this was all real. Grown men, strong men, volunteered to put their lives on the line in order to win a functionally pointless but shiny belt. Being 8 is hard.
By the time I was 11 in 1996, I more than recognized wrestling was fake but the stuntman soap opera of it all still appealed to me. I loved Bret Hart, The Undertaker, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Macho Man, Sting, and Rey Mysterio Jr. and could perform exactly zero of their moves. I tried on many willing participants, stuffed animals, and even a limber sheep. Truth be told, if a fight broke out, real or fake, I would be in trouble. My go-to maneuver is just to ball up into the fetal position and tell jokes until the whole thing blows over. Anyway...
Sting always kicked ass in WCW.
Around the summer of 1996 I was starting to lose interest in pro wrestling in favor of real sports. There was the WWF which had all the superstars and there was the WCW which seemed almost annoying by comparison. In late 1995 and early 1996 a lot of my favorite superstars started disappearing from the WWF roster and since wrestling news wasn’t something I followed or was even easily acessible at the time, I didn’t understand contracts or anything like that. I just wanted to see my favorite superstars but where were they? Turns out many were headed for the WCW. Oh no. Not the WCW.
The wrestling world experienced a seismic shift on July 7, 1996, one that would fuel its popularity for the next couple of years. It was particularly huge for the WCW who pulled ahead of the WWF in ratings and popularity for the only time in its existence for a documented 83 weeks. That night many of the former WWF superstars would meet in a six-man tag match. Earlier in the night the undercards featured matches with some of my favorites like Rey Mysterio Jr, Ric Flair, Dean Malenko, Jim Duggan, and Diamond Dallas Page. Not a bad night on its own but the main event was steeped in mystery and allure unmatched by any up until that point in my short wrestling watching life.
The six-man match featured fresh-from-WWF stars once known as Diesel and Razor Ramon now turned Kevin Nash and Scott Hall upon WCW entry. They were together known as The Outsiders, a fitting title given their recent hop from one federation to the other. They were bad guys. They entered the WCW with an attitude that it was a garbage place to be and that where they come from, the WWF, was superior. At the time they were right but WCW fans understandably didn’t care much for the sentiment. I thought the WCW was lame too but I did not appreciate The Outsiders’ attitude. I was a good boy with a big heart! Doggonit, don’t be mean Outsiders!
Oh no. Here come Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dumber!
The Outsiders had a mystery partner to fill their half of the six-man tag teams but that wrestler was unknown and did not enter the ring with Nash or Hall. Who was it? Where was this wrestler? When would he arrive? Would he ever come?
The Outsiders and their mystery tag partner were going to square off against Sting, a WCW legend and one of the few WCW wrestlers I truly loved at the time, and two other former WWF stars recently signed to WCW: Macho Man Randy Savage and Lex Luger. Savage had made the transition to WCW a few years before and did not come over as a heel, so was well loved despite his prior WWF allegiance unlike The Outsiders. Luger came over just the year prior, in 1995, citing he wasn’t enjoying his stint in the WWF despite the better money. Real or fake, the stories were Macho Man and Lex wanted to come to the WCW and The Outsiders only did so reluctantly. The stage was set then: 2 former WWF blowhards and a mystery man versus 3 WCW flag-wavers and fan favorites. 99% of people were pulling for the WCW-boys, the underdog federation, to defend itself from these big ugly tough guy WWF idiots.
C’mon boys! REPRESENT!
Out the gate, Lex Luger is critically injured and hauled off on a stretcher. Fitting. Without the mystery wrestler to help The Outsiders we have ourselves a “fair” match of 2 on 2 instead of the advertised 3 on 3. More on that in a bit. Zip to the end, The Outsiders somewhat subversively out-maneuver Macho Man and Sting en route to victory with a few cheap shots behind the ref’s back and other expected heel-type shenanigans. When the final bell tolled, The Outsiders were still standing and Savage and Sting lay on the mat, defeated. Upsetting, for sure. But then some music started playing… and it sounded familiar. But it can’t be… no way...
Thank fuck!
Holy shit it’s Hulk Hogan! What the fuck!? WWF’s biggest super star? Well thank God he’s here to save the day! He’s dressed in his classic, bright colored, good guy Hulkamania outfit and he’s here to stand up for the WCW boys. He’s going to put these old WWF foes in their place just like he’d been doing the last few years on a different channel. But… wait… what’s happening? He’s… oh no. He’s attacking Savage and Sting while they’re down on the mat! NOO! NOOO!
Everyone. Everyone there, everyone at home. Every kid, every teenager, every adult. All of them felt betrayed. The bad guys won and then stole another good guy from us! The purest good guy of them all (at the time)! Hulk Hogan! The WWF was ruining the WCW! It was a hostile takeover. Hogan took the mic and told wrestling fans he better get some respect because he’s the reason any of this mattered. He was right. He was huge and that’s why we were upset. Fans hurled trash into the ring, covering The Outsiders in soda, pelting Hogan with popcorn buckets, and even soaking poor Mean Gene Okerlund in flying refuse (click for video). To cap it off, he referred to his new pals, Nash and Hall, and himself, as the New World Order, later simply tabbed the NWO. The popularity of the clash between WCW and NWO would push pro-wrestling up the ratings sheet for years as feuds, shifting tides, and baby-faces turning heel out of nowhere kept all the fans engaged.
Rumor has it that the plan was to take Luger out early in the match so that if Hogan decided to back out of coming out and turning heel, that Luger would return later and do it so the NWO could form either way. Clever. In the end, no matter what, we have 1996’s Bash at the Beach to thank for stimulating wrestling and certainly enthralling little ol’ me into full fledged fanhood and brief adolescent obsession.
“Now there is no sound
If we all live underground
And now it’s virtual insanity”
As for wrestling video games in 1996, there weren’t many. In fact, the two I played this month were on the Sega Saturn and were WWF games. The WCW had hardly the clout for many games at the time, although one did release in 1996 on the PS1, WCW vs. The World, but I don’t own it. More would come in the following years to the N64, namely. The Sega Saturn had the Midway-Williams arcade port WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game and the console developed yet arcade-esque WWF In Your House. They’re both middling, arcade-difficult fighting games that hardly have any element of wrestling strategy associated with them. In Your House is a fair bit superior but both are similar in presentation and style. Interestingly, the roster for Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game featured wrestlers that had already defected from the WWF for the WCW when it released like Razor Ramon (Scott Hall) and Lex Luger. The game was ported from a 1995 arcade game, so that probably explains it.
That does it for wrestling in 1996. The birth of the NWO, the heel-turn of Hogan, and the void of wrestling video games basically summarizes the year. Do you have wrestling memories from 1996?
