On July 14, 1984, Georgia Championship Wrestling’s flagship show World Championship Wrestling—the most-watched wrestling show on cable at the time—took an unexpected turn. Co-host Freddie Miller opened the WTBS broadcast as usual, but immediately moved aside for a surprise guest: World Wrestling Federation owner Vince McMahon. The New York-based McMahon was in Atlanta’s WTBS Studios to tell Georgia Championship Wrestling viewers that the show’s time slot now belonged to him. Promoters Jack Brisco and Gerald Brisco had sold their shares to McMahon one week prior on July 7, cutting out their partner Ole Anderson and handing McMahon the time slot. A blinking and stiff McMahon, in his patented ill-fitting suit, assured audiences, “We promise to bring you the greatest in professional wrestling entertainment today.”
The “greatest,” as it turned out, were re-airings of USA Network and syndicated interview segments with taped house show matches from New York City and Boston. In a galling move, McMahon reneged on his promise to tape matches at WTBS Studios in Atlanta. The canned broadcast angered fans, irked by the promotion’s focus on skits, squash matches, and unathletic performers. These elements didn’t mesh with Southern wrestling (or “rasslin’,” as some called it), a style known for steady work rates with longer matches, stiff blows, and believable kayfabe. Hostility was aroused, with Southern fans particularly annoyed by losing their territory to a rich Yankee. McMahon’s brief stint on TBS was a failure; ratings dropped, station owner Ted Turner gave time slots to two Southern promotions whose shows both outrated WWF’s, and less than a year later McMahon sold his time slot to North Carolina promoter Jim Crockett, whose promotion would later be bought by Turner and renamed WCW. That July 1984 broadcast is referred to colloquially as Black Saturday—at that point the most visible sign yet of McMahon’s scheme to fully conquer North American professional wrestling. It’s a plan that came to full fruition 17 years later, as he would later buy out flagging competitors WCW and ECW in 2001, long after McMahon had destroyed the territorial system that defined wrestling for most of the 20th century.
There are not, however, equivalent demarcation points for wrestling video games, a field as monopolized today as wrestling was in the 2000s. Fallout from Black Saturday saw angry phone calls and letter writing campaigns directed at WTBS, and was part of the chain of events that led to the creation of WWF’s biggest competitor in the ’90s; the 2001 buyouts of both WCW and Paul Heyman’s ECW drove Jerry and Jeff Jarrett to launch Total Nonstop Action, a promotion that improbably still exists 24 years later. But no such resistance came for the protracted death of wrestling as a game genre. It wasn’t a match-up with clear sides, nor much of a fight at all. Instead, a genre once so commonplace that secondhand copies still go for couples of bucks was left in a count-out far, far away from the ring.
It’s how the WWE 2K series—an annual live service game whose latest installment, WWE 2K26, starts at $69.99—became the monolith it is now. The bloated package is an amalgamation of everything WWE has ever purchased, boasting rosters from ECW, WCW, AAA, and more. Dead or alive, retired or active, buyers can take their pick of over 400 wrestlers across over five decades of multiple promotions’ histories. Things that WWE don’t have the rights to, or don’t want to pay for, get blurred out; alleged rapist and sex trafficker McMahon also receives this treatment.
The new WWE 2K release is the only console wrestling game scheduled for 2026; this was also true of 2024 and 2025. 2023 saw one-time WWE licenseholder THQ publish AEW: Fight Forever, the final wrestling game to date for former WWE 2K developer Yuke’s. Prior to that, the last non-WWE console pro wrestling game was Fire Pro Wrestling World in 2017—itself a very niche title in America, as opposed to the broader appeal of full 3D, less technical games which have done better here.
This is a dire state for wrestling games. It’s especially frustrating for those who grew up with high-impact, mashy, and often chaotic games made by wrestling fans at teams such as Yuke’s and Aki Corporation. The WWE 2K titles’ stagnant, sluggish animations are tied into their questionable “simulation style” approach—i.e., the safest and most “realistic” way these moves can be pulled off. There’s an overt focus on photorealism; when the effect works, it’s akin to controlling a televised match at a glance. Yet the tactile satisfaction and fierce competition of older wrestling games is missing here. In its place, accounting for power levels and finessing slow, surgical inputs for uncanny valley renders of corpses.
This series becoming the only show in town for wrestling games is a direct consequence of both WWE’s corporate history and the last 20-odd years of consolidations in gaming—a case of one hand feeding the other until there’s much less to go around. WWE’s temporary monopoly and long-term licensing contracts created an atmosphere that pitted everyone else against licensor THQ post-2000. TNA took until 2008 to release their sole console outing, TNA Impact!, which ironically did not make enough of one to save publisher Midway from going under within the year. When THQ filed for bankruptcy in 2012, 2K Games was quick to scoop up the WWE license and take over the series with WWE 2K14. After eight more games with Yuke’s, the longtime series developer was put out to pasture in favor of NBA 2K developer Visual Concepts. This has been the status quo for wrestling games since 2020.
The problem is compounded further by an absence of original IP titles. Cheaper development with less overhead investment meant that wrestling could remain a competitive genre in the 2000s, even without a major promotion attached to it. Both the Backyard Wrestling and Def Jam series offered pulpy, accessible riffs on wrestling with eclectic mixes of real wrestlers, musicians, and porn stars. The Legends Of Wrestling titles were not particularly great, but still offered robust experiences with iconic wrestlers that became budget gaming staples in their own right. Yuke’s also took a scintillating turn with their Rumble Roses games—fantastic joshi wrestling titles which balance sexuality with mechanical precision and fast-paced matches. There is no such competition in today’s wrestling games, with only indies able to offer something different through throwback-style releases. It’s a consequence of who gets to make games, and for how much, in a burnt-out games industry circa 2026.
To compensate for this, the WWE 2K games are stuffed to the gills with nebulous, fan-focused content. But more content doesn’t mean distinct or even particularly good content. Paul Heyman hosting a Showcase mode and $150 Monday Night War skins don’t bring back the brand competition of Aki’s WCW games or Acclaim’s ill-advised ECW titles. Nor does being able to play as Chyna undo the wrongs done against her by the company. These are Band-Aids for a gaping wound—a hole torn into a genre captured by 2K. In this one way, WWE still holds a monopoly on a part of professional history, able to reshape and give it new context through a one-sided perspective.
This monopoly allows 2K, as a corporation, to exploit wrestling game fans on loop. If someone wants to play a new game from a current promotion with a robust selection of modes, they are forced to sign up for a My 2K account and contend with the obscene price gauging hallmark to all 2K sports releases. It’s a grim fate shared by all sports not claimed by Electronic Arts, yet one that stings tenfold for wrestling. Because professional wrestling, as an enterprise, hasn’t been this exciting for years.
As ECW and TNA vet Tommy Dreamer pointed out last year, WWE no longer has a pure monopoly with AEW on the market; today, they’re joined at the hip with UFC after being bid on in 2023 by AEW owner Tony Khan and now face sagging WrestleMania ticket sales. There are three major American promotions with TV shows (AEW’s flagship, Dynamite, even airs on TBS), Japan and Mexico continue to be a hotbed, and the independent scene is always producing interesting new prospects. Thanks to the proliferation of services like Triller, Wrestle Universe, Internet Wrestling TV, and even YouTube, there has never been a better or easier time to watch wrestling. If only the same could be said for wrestling games.