WWF WrestleMania 2000 Review (Retro WedNESday #2)

WWF WrestleMania 2000 (N64) (Retro WedNESday #2)
Developer: AKI Corporation
Publisher: THQ
Release Date: October 31, 1999

WrestleMania week feels like exactly the right time to revisit this one.

If you read last week’s Retro WedNESday on Harvest Moon 64, you already know that I got that game with WWF No Mercy on Christmas 2000 and it ended up being the one that dominated most of my time despite the fact that I was super excited for No Mercy.

What I didn’t fully dig into was why I was so hyped for No Mercy to begin with, besides just being a big wrestling fan. The answer is WWF WrestleMania 2000, which I had been playing since it came out and loved so much I was counting down the days until the sequel dropped.

Before WrestleMania 2000, I was a WCW video game guy for the most part. WCW World Tour on N64 was the best wrestling game I had ever played when it came out. It had this tight, responsive gameplay with a countering system that actually rewarded you for learning the timing, and I was hooked. It looked and played great.

Then WCW/NWO Revenge came out and did everything World Tour did but better. Bigger roster, smoother gameplay, more modes. I was all-in. Those AKI-developed WCW games were in a completely different league than the WWF games of the same era, which were being handled by Acclaim and were just not on the same level. I enjoyed War Zone, but for the most part, WWF N64 games were kinda like WCW PS1 in that they were kinda trash. Enjoyable, especially as a kid, but the AKI WCW N64 games were just mind-blowing at the time.

The funny thing is that around this same time, I was preferring WWF TV over WCW TV. The Attitude Era was hitting its peak, the WWF roster was way more interesting to me, but I was still buying WCW games because they were simply better. Then WWF figured out what was happening and brought in THQ, and THQ brought in AKI.

WrestleMania 2000 was the first result of that partnership, and it was exactly what I had been hoping for. The same AKI engine that made Revenge so good, now wrapped around the WWF roster. Stone Cold, The Rock, Triple H, Mankind, The Undertaker, all the way down the card. The gameplay was instantly familiar. The countering system, the momentum-based Irish whips, the way chain wrestling built into bigger spots. If you had played Revenge, you already knew how to play this game.

It was night and day compared to WWF War Zone. I had fun with it at the time because it was how you could play WWF on N64, but man was it trash. As a WWF fan, WrestleMania 2000 was a godsend.

Over the course of a year, I’d say I probably pumped a couple hundred hours into this game. I loved it. It was a better Revenge, in every sense, and made even better because it featured the stars and shows I was most enjoying watching at the time.

The Road to WrestleMania career mode is what separated this game from everything that came before it. You start as any superstar you like and work your way through the entire WWF title structure over time in a series of randomly assigned matches at the start.

You’re building toward winning the WWF Championship and main-eventing WrestleMania, but it’s not a straight line. There are feuds built into the progression, moments where other wrestlers call you out or get in your way, and title defenses layered on top of everything else. The whole thing has a genuine sense of scale that felt like no wrestling career mode before it. You felt like you were actually living a career rather than just cycling through matches on a menu. I still believe to this day that WrestleMania 2000 has the best career mode of any wrestling game ever made.

The roster was massive for the time, over 50 WWF Superstars, and the Create-a-Wrestler mode was the best the series had offered at that point. You could edit existing wrestlers’ attires, which was new. The presentation all the way through felt polished. Entrance music, arenas, the whole package.

Now, the big question people always want to argue about: WrestleMania 2000 or No Mercy? No Mercy gets more of the historical credit, and I understand why. The story mode improved on this one and the gameplay got a little tighter. It deserves its reputation. But my answer has always been WrestleMania 2000, and here’s why. No Mercy felt like a refinement. WrestleMania 2000 felt like a revelation.

When you’ve been watching two companies compete for years and you’ve been picking the WCW game every time because it was the better product, and then the WWF finally gets that same engine and that same development team and ships a game that’s everything you wanted, the impact of that first experience doesn’t just go away.

No Mercy is the better-designed game by a margin. WrestleMania 2000 is the better experience, and I don’t think those are the same thing.

This is, for me, still the best wrestling game ever made. And I wish that WWE could partner with some publisher and developer with the same talent that made this game (and No Mercy and the WCW ones) and release a modern day version of it.

WWF WrestleMania 2000 gets a five out of five: EXCELLENT.