Top games of my youth: Pro Wrestling on NES

In the early days of the NES there were no official tie-ins with real sport organizations. There was no NBA, NFL, NHL, FIFA, or WWE partnerships. I was a big fan of wrestling in the mid 80's so we had to get that fix in somehow and Pro Wrestling was a fantastic game, even if none of the characters were real people.

src

This was back in the days when Nintendo decided all the cover art and all of it was pretty generic looking. It worked for a long time and since we didn't have anything other than Atari to compare it to, I kind of appreciated that the cover art was mostly actual gameplay instead of some artist's rendition of the game that didn't resemble what you were actually going to be playing at all.

src

You didn't have a lot of options and there really wasn't any advantage to using one character vs another. The only real difference between one to the next was some sort of special move and since the NES only had 2 buttons, it was almost certainly very simple to pull off these moves.

The reason why I really liked this game wasn't because of amazing graphics or even really good controls. I liked it because I had a group of rowdy neighborhood friends that were also wrasslin' fans and they would come over and we would have silly tournaments that sometimes resulted in us wrestling one another if we got frustrated with the game.

src

it was extremely easy to get frustrated as well because there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why one person would get to do their move as opposed to another. It may have been arbitrary but we decided that the "best" way to get your moves in was to abuse the controller and hit the buttons like a madman.

src

The resemblance to real life wrestlers was undeniable in some instances but I guess they did their homework to ensure that they were not going to get sued.

In one player mode this was just some silly game but back in those days, having any game that two people could play against one another that was even remotely fun was a great game to have.

I can still close my eyes and see the giant TV on the floor with the NES plugged into an analog connection on that TV and the controllers sprawled across the carpeting where we would sit on the floor and play for hours.

I'm sure my Mom might have lost her mind a little bit because me and my friends, all of which were around 10-12 years old, were almost certainly making a ridiculous amount of noise. On more than one occasion she would come down, smile a smile of definitive secret anger then tell us, not ask, that after one more match everyone has to go outside.

That was fine, we liked to do things outside as well but now since we had the imagery of wrestling in our minds we probably just started kicking the crap out of one another and doing very dangerous moves like dropkicks and pile-drivers.

I remember one day I did a move on a younger kid and kind of seriously hurt him. The parents had a chat with us about that after that day. No real harm done. the kid was fine and guess what? We kept doing the wrestling moves anyway.

src

Pro Wrestling is considered one of the better games of the early NES library, and it is a game that stays in my mind even though it was extremely basic. There are probably several other games that stick out in my mind during that time period because unlike today, we didn't just have 100 games. At the time that I had this game I likely only had a handful of other games and once this was purchased, I wasn't going to get another one for many months.

This sort of scarcity encouraged me and my friends to get different games and to instead borrow them from one another. To me, probably because of my age, that was a golden age of gaming. Today, I am spoiled for choice and almost never finish or master any of the games that I have.