All Elite Wrestling, the company that’s shaken pro-wrestling up for a couple of years now, announced AEW GAMES. They will launch two mobile games and a console game. If that news wasn’t exciting enough, developing the console game is none other than Yuke's. The Japanese developer developed all of the WWE games from WWF SmackDown! in 2000 all the way up until 2K19 and made some of the fan-favorite UFC games like UFC Undisputed 2009 and 2010. Also working on the game is Hideyuki “Geta” Iwashita who is best known for his work on WWF No Mercy.
The trailer states that the game is in early development and that the final product may look different and with that kind of cautionary warning, you could assume that it would look buggy in some form, but it was quite the opposite. The game looked tremendous and got fans very excited.
Off of the 60 seconds of gameplay that we see, it looks like the game will mix arcade-style fighting with wrestling in a way that hasn’t been done in a long time, especially not at the mainstream level. Realism was welcomed in the pro-wrestling game industry, but this change feels refreshing and is coming right at the right time.
We only see a few wrestlers in the trailer. Two of those are Chris Jericho and Kenny Omega, who look like they’re in the match of their lives before Women’s World Champion Hikaru Shida surprises Omega with an attack. That confirms that inter-gender wrestling will be a thing. There’s also a tease at the end of The Meltzer Driver as performed by CAWs that haven’t been created yet.
At the press conference, Kenny Omega talked the game up in a big way. “I want to reimagine games,” he said. “I want to give wrestling fans the game they want… I want a game to be fun”. CEO Tony Khan said “we make a point to listen to our fans” and “this is just the beginning of a new era for gaming for wrestling fans around the world”. He also called AEW GAMES “revolutionary” and when you see what they’re done with programmed since their debut in January of 2019, it’s hard to argue.
