AEW: Fight Forever Wants To Bring Back Wrestling Games

All Elite Wrestling’s first video game, AEW: Fight Forever, has a lot riding on it. It’s the company’s first go at gaming, and a new entrant in a genre that has been dominated by a single series for over 15 years. AEW founder and president Tony Khan says he’s invested eight figures of his own money into the game’s development.

That might seem like an unnecessary expense for a three-year-old company trying to compete with the gargantuan WWE. But fans who remember wrestling at the height of its popularity two decades ago know how closely tied the faux-sport is tied into video games, and how much a hit game could make the fledgling league a contender.

With the release of AEW: Fight Forever, there could be a serious alternative to the dominant WWE 2K series for the first time in a decade. So while Fight Forever is a litmus test for the AEW wrestling promotion’s popularity three and a half years into its existence, it's also a test of whether a long stagnant genre can still find an audience beyond die-hard wrestling fans.

In the week since Fight Forever was released, the game has gotten off to a modest start. The title debuted at number three on UK sales charts, according to GameIndustry.biz, and at the time this article was published, Fight Forever was the sixth highest selling Xbox game and the fifthteenth highest selling Playstation game on Amazon. Publisher THQ and AEW declined to to provide The Messenger with sales figures.

"It's the studio that made the old WWE games," industry analyst Michael Pachter told The Messenger. "WWE never sold more than 3.5 million units. This one is probably closer to 1.5 million."

There's reason why older wrestling games sold so well. In the 90s and 2000s, WWF (now known as WWE) and its long-dead competitor World Championship Wrestling ruled Monday night television. Wrestling games benefitted from the renewed interest in the dramatized combat soap opera, ushering in a golden age of the genre. Games based on both companies’ television content not only sold well, but were beloved by critics.

The appeal of these games wasn’t recreating what millions of people watched on TV, nor did they only appeal to die-hard wrestling fans: Easy to learn controls, highly replayable single player modes, and madcap multiplayer made them must play games. The fact that they featured larger than life characters like The Undertaker and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin at the height of their popularity was a bonus.

Wrestling games were so successful that publishers jumped at the opportunity to make their own, with or without actual wrestlers. Electronic Arts commissioned AKI to make the beloved hip-hop wrestling games Def Jam Vendetta and Def Jam: Fight For NY. Konami brought in Yuke’s for the all-women's wrestling series Rumble Roses. Activision even made a wresting game featuring characters from the lucrative Simpsons franchise.

But by the late 2000s the golden age for wrestling games was ending, mirroring the decline in popularity of its real life counterpart. Sequels to “non-wrestling” wrestling games like Def Jam: Icon and Rumble Roses XX underperformed. And in 2007 WWE (formerly WWF) consolidated its video game offerings to a single multi-platform franchise, Smackdown vs Raw.

That left gamers who weren’t keen on playing as upcoming stars like John Cena and Batista hard pressed to find a wrestling game for them. There were a few attempts to dethrone the WWE's dominance, but developers and publishers were hesitant to release a wrestling game without the sole mainstream wrestling brand attached to it.

When Take Two acquired the franchise in 2013, the Smackdown series became WWE 2K. Though it’s remained popular, these games have been divisive, as the pick-up and play sensibilities of the genre have been phased out in favor of slower, more simulation style gaming.

"You create characters, you create your rings, or your create championships," AEW professional wrestler Evil Uno told The Messenger. "But when you get down to just the very core of the game, when you're trying to fight someone, you have to learn 12 different systems to get the full grasp of how to play it."

Fight Forever is a throwback to the simpler days, he says.

“If I want to play a wrestling game nowadays, I have to teach my friend how to play the wrestling game,” Uno told The Messenger. “In an arcade-style wrestling game... I could get my little sister to come play, and within five minutes, she's capable of playing it without a long entry barrier.”

Instead of trying to match the scope, TV accurate presentation, and complexity of the WWE games, Fight Forever is focused on the quirky, arcade fun that made these games mainstream in the first place. The company has also promised to expand and support the game post-launch, including additional combatants and adding a new 30-player Battle Royal-inspired game mode.

If Fight Forever is able to find an even bigger audience with its more inclusive feel borrowed from older wrestling classics, there are plenty of smaller, independent titles that stand to benefit. The Wrestling Code, developed by Virtual Basement, is a live service wrestling game featuring motion captured maneuvers and real life independent wrestlers. Ultra Pro Wrestling, from Hyperfocus Games, offers a deep career mode spanning decades of a player’s virtual career. Even the retro, pro-wrestling themed role playing game WrestleQuest could stand to benefit from a renewed interest in the wrestling video game genre.

Stephen Masson, a UK-based independent developer, has been working on a procedurally animated, physics-based wrestling game since 2019. While the title is still a long way from release, it has attracted attention on social media and among wrestling game content creators on YouTube. 

Masson told The Messenger that he started working on his untitled game in hopes of giving the genre some much needed variety.

“I'm under no false pretense that I'm going to be outselling WWE games,” he said. “But a game that offers more dynamic and ever changing gameplay could provide a viable alternative to fill gaps in the market, of which I think there are plenty.”

Smaller games like Masson’s aren’t trying to become the second-coming of No Mercy and Smackdown. But if a mid-budget game like Fight Forever can remind audiences that wrestling games aren't just for fans of the sport, it could open a door that’s long been shut.

"It was so monolithic before, it was just WWE games for about 10 years," Masson said. "It's great to have more options available because it means even if some of these projects aren't great, it doesn't really matter because other developers can learn from those projects. It's something I try to be conscious of when making my own game."

New games breathing new ideas that reinvigorate the genre is exactly what wrestling games need, Uno told The Messenger.

“I feel like wrestling games are on the cusp of a return,” Uno said. “We might see a new wrestling game that overtakes the AEW game, and the WWE game, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It'll only provide more wrestling content in the space and maybe open up our eyes to a different approach for the genre in the process.”