WCW Nitro

The nineties were wrestling's golden age and I was there. Monday nights, WCW Monday Nitro on satellite, Hulk Hogan as a heel in a black shirt — and the moment the broadcast ended, you wanted to throw those moves yourself. PC games responded to that fast, sometimes way too fast.

WCW Nitro from 1998 by Inland Productions is a fighting game based on the World Championship Wrestling show of the same name. You get the roster of stars from back then — names like Sting, Goldberg, and Hogan were at the absolute peak of wrestling's popularity. The game tries to bring the atmosphere of the arena into DOS, complete with the crowd, the ring, and the typically over-the-top spectacle surrounding the matches.

But then comes the cold shower. The controls are cumbersome in a way that's hard to describe, but you'll notice immediately. Moves are executed through combinations that respond with lag and uncertainty, so a lot of the action looks more like an accident than intention. The computer opponent can frustrate you — not because it's smart, but because the system itself is unpredictable. It's the kind of game where you win less through skill and more through figuring out what the computer tolerates.

What I remember most is the sound. Sound Blaster spewing out commentary and ring effects — and for a moment, that was enough. You were twelve, Goldberg was on the monitor, and that alone had value. Today those tricks don't help. The graphics were average then, jarringly shaky now, and without nostalgic attachment to specific wrestlers, the game gives you no reason to keep going after the first match. This is exactly the kind of title made to sit on store shelves at the same time as the product wave — not to last.

Who will WCW Nitro appeal to today? Almost exclusively those who watched the Monday Night Wars in the second half of the nineties and have a personal connection to those names. As a time capsule it has a certain value — it reminds you what wrestling looked like when it was truly mainstream and WCW had WWE in the corner. As a game itself, it's more of a historical document than entertainment. You can get through it in a browser in half an hour and that's exactly how long you'll need.