Take Down

A wrestler lies on his back and I dive at him from the top rope. That's Take Down — a wrestling simulator from 1988 that thought computer wrestling was dead serious business. On screen you see two guys in shirts rolling around on the mat trying to pin each other. A pretty weird idea of fun when your alternatives were something like Contra or Ghouls 'n Ghosts.

It's an amateur wrestling simulator with a simple premise: you face off against an opponent on the mat and try to pin him or win on points. You pick your wrestler, and then it's on — you play a single match or a tournament. No story, no world-ending stakes. Pure action in the octagon, or in this case on the mat.

The controls are a straightforward set of moves — throws, holds, takedowns. Trading moves with the computer or another player cycles through the same positions and combinations without much variety. The graphics are stiff, movement is more a sequence of poses than smooth animation. Sound? The occasional heavy breathing. The gameplay itself is mechanical; the computer can hold its own, but once you nail it with one combo, next time it'll notice and give you a willing opponent. It's not exactly the game for long nights in.

Take Down falls into that category of '80s sports simulators that tried to be realistic and gradually became outdated. Wrestling isn't about PC code — it's about physics, about how the body moves. The computer back then couldn't pull that off properly. Today I know it mainly as a curiosity.

If you check it out in DOSBox in your browser, don't expect miracles. It's more about seeing how mid-'80s developers imagined a sports game — straightforward, unadorned, storyeless. More of a historical document than entertainment. But that's exactly what makes it interesting for those who dig seeing how games evolved.