No not the real sport of pro wrestling you damned fool (or should I refer to it as the fake sports entertainnment?), I'm talking about the NES game Pro Wrestling.

Funny story how I came to own Pro Wrestling. A cable repair man visited my best friend's house and brought the game with him. Apparently someone left the cartridge of his van in a grocery story parking lot, so he thought he'd give it to the first customers who he visited. My best friend didn't have a NES though (instead he had the stellar Atari 7800 which created a deep rift between him and his parents for years), so he brought it over to my house and immediately we put it in to play. . . and couldn't figure a damned thing out.

Coming by the game in the manner that I did presented a problem. No instruction manual. That's not a big deal today since nearly every game has an in-game tutorial and even if it doesn't a user guide is no more than one trip to GameFAQs away. Unfortunately this was 1988 and Al Gore was too busy running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination that he hadn't had time to create the internet yet.

Pro Wrestling had extremely difficult controls for being such an early NES game. By today's standards it's nothing, but during a time when 99% of games required only the push of the A or B button to do an action, Pro Wrestling was in another league. To pull off a move you'd have to lock up with your opponent, and then press a direction on the D pad and then press A again. Again, not all that complex, but that was nearly rocket science for that era, and it took a while to learn. While now and then I'd pull off a special move by accident for about a month my matches consisted of nothing but punches, kicks, and the occasional clothes-line. Just about as entertaining as a lot of real wrestling matches.

In fact, not having the instructions was such a problem that for the first week I couldn't even figure out how to choose a different wrestler other than the default choice, the worthless Fighter Hayabusa. Hayabusa just sucked. His special move was the Back Brain Kick, which unlike just about every other move was performed outside of a lock-up hold. Instead you had to position him at just the right angle and pray to god your opponent didn't move a single step, otherwise you'd end up hurt on the canvas.

It took about a month for us to figure out how the game worked, and by the time we got all the moves down we realized, that this was actually a very sweet game. Frankly it's far better than it had any right to be when you look at all those early NES sports titles. The game still holds up reasonably well today, and I'd put it in the top 3 wrestling games of all time.

One of the main reasons is because of the characters. The designers were definitely wrestling fans, because they NAILED the characters. You had the worthless Hayabusa (who supposedly was a tribute to some popular Japanese wrestler), a martial artist named Kin Korn Karn (who really wasn't much better than the worthless Hayabusa), King Slender who was the Rick Flair knock-off, Giant Panther who was the Hulk Hogan knock-off, and of course the Amazon. The Amazon was the bad guy. His special moves were actually cheating moves. For one of them he'd pull out a club and beat the other guy in the head, and then turn to the referee gesturing that he had done nothing illegal. How great is that?? That was a real simple gesture that wasn't seen again in wrestling games for years but added a very important dimension to the game.

The best of all was a pink Mexican luchadore named Starman, but you couldn't actually play as him because if you did, you were gay. I mean, HE WAS PINK. At age 10 can you really risk playing as a pink character? I think not. Not unless you're the only one home and you're playing in the dark with the curtains closed.  Though to be fair there was a lot of in the dark playing for me.

And hey if nothing else, this game was singlehandledly responsible for one of the most overused videogame mistranslated quotes, "A Winner Is You." That's got to count for something.