8 Cancelled Wrestling Video Games
Super Mario was going to be a superstar.
Aside from last year's welcome re-emergence of Fire Pro Wrestling, 2K's WWE series has pretty much held a stranglehold on the wrestling video game genre since seizing the license back in 2013. Other than the occasional free-to-play mobile money-maker, our digital squared circles are now almost entirely consigned to the publisher's annual simulations of this great sport.
The regrettable combination of WWE being both the only major western wrestling promotion around (well, at least until AEW kicks into life) yet not commanding anywhere near like the popularity they did in either of their two boom periods means appetite simply doesn't exist for the license to extend beyond the most basic of bone-benders.
It's a real shame. At one point, the cultural reach of the WWE brand was so widespread that their properties could be recontextualised for a whole string of different video game genres, from the Destruction Derby-like Crush Hour to the scarcely believable Betrayal, a Game Boy Color title in which the goal was to save a kidnapped Stephanie McMahon. Really.
Had the fates aligned differently, we might have been able to add a couple of similarly outlandish fantastical brawlers to that list. These are the wrestling games left on Brutus Beefcake's cutting room floor.
8. WWE Titans: Parts Unknown
Before beginning a fruitful association with Nintendo which resulted in successful spin-offs Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon and a Wii reimagining of Punch-Out!!, Next Level Games pitched a very unorthodox wrestling game to then publishers THQ.
Concept art trawled from the personal portfolios of current and former Next Level staffers unearthed the existence of the proposed WWE Titans: Parts Unknown. The name offers a clue to its direction: the superstars were turned into literally larger-than-life characters, and transported from the ring to highly stylised, fantastical settings based on exaggerated aspects of their personas.
As a taster, an even-more-supersized Triple H called a crumbling castle courtyard his home - replete with trademark iron cross adorning the rug - whilst John Cena was set to duke it out on the rooftops of a murky metropolis. Think WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game, but multiplied by about a million.
As intriguing as the Tekken-like take was, publishers THQ weren't keen, and nixed the idea before it could proceed beyond the concept stage.