As long as there have been video games, there have been sport games. There are games such as football, soccer, and tennis; almost from any sport you can imagine, all have been adapted to an electronic entertainment form. And one of those sports that have gained critical acclaim over the years for its different adaptations and highly replay value is wrestling.
One of the first known wrestling games was Wrestlemania, which launched in 1989 for the Nintendo system. The game contained six characters based on popular wrestlers such as Andre the Giant, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Hulk Hogan, and a couple of others. The gameplay was limited, the characters could only perform certain actions such as running, kicking, punching and head banging; also every character move was customized to mimic the movements of the actual wrestlers.
After Wrestlemania a new series of games came, and every one of them looked similar to Wrestlemania. Then in 1994 WWF: Raw appeared on the market (the game was a sequel to WWF: Royal Rumble and a "spiritual" successor to WWF: Super WrestleMania). WWF: Raw was the game that marked the standards for wrestling games: as the gameplay was perfect for the time, from graphics to the controls and the sounds, giving the player for the first an actual sensation of what it is to be a wrestler, without actually getting hurt in the process.
