WrestleMania season is in full swing, and a quick scan of the comments thread of any on the many, many Facebook WWE groups I follow will tell you that this is the most exciting WWE event ever and everything is better now that HHH is in charge, but it still pales in comparison to the Attitude Era, and we all know who’s going to win anyway because it’s in their contracts. It’s a fandom, is what I’m saying. It’s full of opinions and arguments and people trying to make valid commentary on what’s going on in the business, and that’s a lot easier to do in this age, when even the brass itself isn’t insisting that the storylines are real anymore.
That same commentary is right at the heart ofWWE 2K23, which takes its subject matter seriously, but isn’t afraid to point and laugh at the world’s most famous wrestling promotion for all is various blunders over the decades. That’s something the fans have been doing all along, and now that even the games aren’t making us play pretend, it’s a nice little bit of verification that we’ve been herd all this time.
WWE 2K23’s Showcase mode is laid out like a documentary, with serious-business-suit-clad John Cena leading you through all the times he just wasn’t good enough to lay on top of his coworkers for three straight seconds. It’s a little cheesy, sure, but his dignified commentary on the likes of Brock Lesnar,The Undertaker, Kurt Angle, and other greats really sells his opponents as fierce competitors, and it’s easy to get caught up in the majesty of the “Never Give Up” theme that ties his TED talk together.
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The two MyRISE story modes, on the other hand, put your own created superstars in the spotlight, placing you in the shoes of a brand new WWE SuperStar, and they paint the industry, and specifically the WWE, with a brush that’s dripping with face-palming cynicism rather than warm, glowing nostalgia and fanfare. Kayfabe is dead, and the guy who took the fall for it is running the company now. (Thanks, Jean-Paul!) Still, even though the performers don’t have to go through method acting their in-ring personas 24/7 anymore, WWE 2K23 still treats the backstage segments as though they’re really happening, regardless of whether the cameras would be rolling. It’s a weird combination, having your some of your more unhinged rivals calling for your blood while you’re just chatting withShawn or Mollyabout how you can increase fan engagement and drive up sales numbers. Most real-world department synergy meetings don’t have Linda from HR trying to bust in and lay you out with a kendo stick, after all.
Still, the game makes it work through subtle little fourth-wall breaking meta jokes. One story mode has you playing a wrestler who had already become famous overseas, but once you make the move to WWE, you’re forced to give up your name, your clothes, and your gimmick, instead becoming some guy called The Lock who wears a padlock from John Cena’s old schtick around his neck and comes out of a giant same for some reason. Your character thinks it’s stupid. The guy running the show thinks it’s stupid. WWE legends who don’t even know you will text you to tell you how stupid it is.
They include The Rock (because it’s very similar to The Lock. Get it?) and Shane Helms, who mentions that coming to the WWE cost him his name, gimmick, title — basically everything you’re giving up — to become The Hurricane, an emerald-clad, cape-wearing, masked man who believes himself to be a superhero and so obviously isn’t. Meanwhile, ol' Duane Johnson brings up the whole legacy burden of having famous relatives come before him — the focus of the game’s other story mode — and how fans hated the gimmick he WWE first saddled him with, complete with a costume that seemed to be made of blue and white Party City streamers.
That’s where these meta jokes, and the MyRISE mode in generally, really hit it out of the park. We’re forced to play through the types of gimmicks we’ve been collectively complaining about forages— sorry,eras.
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The snark isn’t just contained to MyRISE either. Having survived the abysmally bad General Manager modes of the Smackdown vs RAW era, (which were a month-by-month rinse-and-repeat of booking the exact same wrestlers in the exact same angles or, alternatively, actually try to have fun and lose as a result) I was eager to run a four-promotion MyGM mode as soon as WWE 2K23 arrived. Not wanting to waste time weighing the pros and cons of each individual GM and brand, I closed my eyes and randomly scrolled until I ended up as former WCW GM Eric Bischoff running the show at WCW. Convenient. While the sets reminiscent of the doomed Monday Nitro drew me back to the old days of flipping between the USA and TNT networks for two straight hours, it felt like a fairly standard affair, if a little out of place to be playing the “wrong” promotion from the Monday Night Wars in a WWE property.
And then I watched my first title match. Once the competitors are announced and the bell dings, the ringside commentary team turns on the hype machine, building up WCW as the promotion that surpassed WWE from years during the ’90s and finally giving it a legitimate, nationwide contender. And then it flawlessly flips the script to immediately pointing out that the WCW World Heavyweight Titlewasthe most prestigious belt in the world, until writer Vince Russo (who they only refer to as “that writer”) decided to put it on actor David Arquette and, later, himself — which was generally the moment we ’90s wrestling fans knew it was pretty much over for dubya-see-dubya. On one hand, it’s a clever jab at an old rival. On the other, WWE nowownsthat brand, and while Russo is largely responsible for WCW’s downfall, he had also been the WWE’s lead writer when the company finally rose back to the top of the Monday Night Ratings War, so it wraps back around to being a weird, meta kind of self-own.
Coupled with recent shake-up in management at the top, maybe all these tongue-in-cheek jokes are a sign that things are really coming together for the WWE, that fan-favorite performers will no longer besaddled with bad gimmicks, and that we’ve been heard. And if not, at least they were good for a laugh and gave us more to complain on the Internet about.
