Superstar Wrestling Game!

When I was a kid, in the backs of the magazines were ads for wrestling related crap. One such piece of wrestling crap was the Superstars of Wrestling Game. The ad was a tiny murky affair, barely readable with a tiny black and white photo that was either Bigfoot or some piece of the game itself. The ad copy for it was something along the lines of “All of the fast paced fun of wrestling right in your own home!” and this thrilled me to no end. Wrestling back then was like a gay cousin, everyone had one but people rarely spoke about it, so there wasn’t all the wrestling merchandise that there is today. And there certainly wasn’t many wrestling ‘games’. It was mine and my friends’ secret shame. So to enjoy it in the privacy of my own home without judging eyes, yes this was something for me to get behind.

In 1985, $15 was a LOT of money for me, the exact price of the game, plus shipping and handling. I debated with myself about buying that game for a long time. I weighed the pros and cons. I tried to decipher the murky looking picture in the mag. I read and reread the copy of the ad. “All the fast paced fun of wrestling right in your own home!” So I took the plunge and sent off $15 cash (not a check) which I had received from my grandparents for my birthday. And I waited. I envisioned playing the game and all of the fun I would have. For 4-6 weeks I did this. And it never came. Maybe it’s just a little late, I thought and waited some more. And it never came. I would come home expecting to see it on our doorstep but IT NEVER CAME. Still, everyday (seriously, EVERDAY) I would speculate on all the cool stuff I would do and the matches I would have. I probably had more fun speculating on the stuff I’d do than the actual game.

In 1986, $15 was still a lot of money for me. And guess what? It finally came. I think I timed it out as a little over a year and a half before it arrived. I couldn’t believe it when it finally did. I had almost forgotten about it but when I heard the air brakes of the UPS truck, it was the first thing I thought of, like a soldier coming home from war. I RAN to the door and busted it out and started reading all of the rules.

I guess I don’t have to tell you that it wasn’t as good as a 13 year old boy’s obsessive imagination could have built it up to be, but it was OK. Really, most of the game was decided by dice roles (2D6 for all my DnD nerds in the house) and all you really decided is when to go for the pin. Everything else was just rolling dice and totaling up points.

I played the shit out of that game. Nearly every day for years. I could play it by myself so friends were not needed. Heck, the game played itself. I wasn’t needed. Yet, I set up matches and personalities and feuds, and then rolled and added.

But that wasn’t all. There were other sets so I wanted the other sets. But the ads stopped appearing. No more was there the promise of ‘the fast paced dice rolling action of pro wrestling right in MY home’. I wrote the company and asked if they were still selling the new sets and much quicker than I ever got the game to begin with, I got a form letter saying they went out of business. In hindsight, how could they go out of business in a venture that was almost assuredly two college kids in their dorm room photocopying these cheap ass games and mailing them out, but they did. Maybe they finally discovered girls.

I’ve always been curious, yes 20 years later, what the other wrestler cards were like. I saw ads for female wrestler cards (“Match ‘em up against the guys and see what happens!”) and all sorts of stipulation matches (“Settle the score with an Indian strap match!”). So by the grace of the beautiful beautiful internet, I found a bunch of tribute sites to that darn game. And there’s folks still playing it. And someone has taken the initiative to program the game so you can play it on your computer. What a weird world.

A funny fact about the game: it wasn’t licensed by anyone so they couldn’t say who the wrestler cards were due to worry of copywrite infringement. They hinted at who the wrestlers were by giving the wrestler’s moves creative names to ‘clue you in.’ For instance, a guy would have ‘the Texas punch’ and ‘the spinning toe hold’, so I could deduce that it was Terry Funk, who was from Texas and used that hold. Often the names for the moves were ridiculous (which my pals and I hated because it wasn’t ‘serious enough’) and bordered on racist/sexist/ and just plain nonsensical. Now I look back and I think the names are hilarious. I will now give you a short list of some of my favorite moves from the game and their points values.

-“CroMag Bodyslam 9pts” from the Missing Link's card. See he was the missing link in human evolution but he has Cro-Magnon leanings, and in that way, we learn about science as we wrestle.
-“Fairy Bodyslam 8 pts” from Adrian Adonis, who played a gay character. I would have preferred the Limp Wristed Bodyslam, but beggars can’t be choosers. This guy’s card was filled with every innuendo but the Homo-Headlock.
-“GomerPyle Driver 12 pts” from Sgt Slaughter. This is gold. Comic gold. No comment necessary.
-“Sing Russian National Anthem 4 pts” from Nikolai Volkoff, who sang before his matches, but how do you get half as many points as the FairyBodyslam with it??? From singing? This was little me’s first run in with inequality. Until the Fairy Bodyslam gets at least 3xs as much credit as singing, there will be no equality.
-“Strut and whoop 6 pts” from Ric Flair, which gets half as many points as the GomerPyle Driver?? If I ever get into a fight, the first thing I’m gonna do is strut and whoop and bank those 6 pts. Take that, frat boy.
-“The Apartheid Crab 10 pts” for Col. DeBeers, who played a racist South African. Now is he putting Apartheid in a crab, thus negating it, or is he putting other people in the crab and thus oppressing them? The mind boggles.
-“Satan Slam 8 pts” for Kevin Sullivan, who made a deal with the devil to learn his bodyslam.
-“Hawaiian Punch 9 pts” for Don Muraco, who was of course Hawaiian, but had no affiliation to Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch asshole who sucker punched people while they were drinking.
-“Muscrat Suplex 10pts” for Captain from Captain and Tennile…nah, I’m just kidding. It was for Hillbilly Elmer. It still makes about as much sense, though. What was up with Muscrat Love?
-And lastly my favorite of the moves, “the Brian Claw”. It was for Baron Von Raschke, who performed his dreaded claw on anyone named Brian. Actually, I think it’s supposed to be ‘Brain’ claw but it’s misspelled on the card and became forever known as the “Brian Claw” to myself and a bunch of other giggling virgins.