WWF RAW Review (SNES) (Retro WedNESday #16)
Developer: Sculptured Software
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Released: November 1994
After weeks of frustrating trash games that I had no connection with as a kid, like The Lion King and Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!, this week we’re getting back on track with one of my absolute childhood favorites.
As a kid obsessed with wrestling growing up during the age of the mighty SNES (which is still one of my favorite consoles today), I played and owned all of the WWF games. And the early ones were very similar.
WWF Super WrestleMania was, while obviously a step up from the NES games, a very basic experience. A decent little collection of talent and a game that looked good, but the moves were the same, and there were no finishers, so it was very much mash the buttons as hard and fast as you can until your little fingers start hurting. Or that’s how I played it anyway. Am I reviewing Super WrestleMania? Maybe, but not today.
From there we went to WWF Royal Rumble, which was better than Super WrestleMania. For this one, I played the Genesis version. This game had the same basic tournament mode and tag team matches, but introduced the Royal Rumble match. Are you surprised? You shouldn’t have been. It would’ve been pretty crappy to release a game called Royal Rumble and not have a version of the famous battle royal playable in it. It had a nice roster, slightly more in-depth controls, and the Royal Rumble match was always a blast to play. And you could do finishers, too. Is this the game I’m reviewing? Of course not, at least not this week… next week? No.
The game of the week is none other than WWF RAW, for which I’m back on the SNES version. Was there a Genesis version? Probably. I honestly don’t know, and I’m trying to write a review, not stop to Google something.
Turns out I can talk and type at the same time, and so I asked Google, and she says there was (yes, my Gemini is a girl, because what dude wants to listen to another dude talk?). Could and should I edit this before posting? Yes, probably… but if past weeks are any indication, then I won’t.
We’ll find out together. If you’re seeing this, I obviously didn’t. If you’re not seeing it, then I did, and you have no idea.
WWF RAW has the same general look as Super WrestleMania and especially Royal Rumble. That’s not surprising because, well, how else could you make a 16-bit wrestling game look? This isn’t a wandering, but I just remembered that WCW SuperBrawl existed for SNES, and it looked a lot different. And not in a good way.
So someone figured out a way to screw it up.
WWF RAW kept the button-mashing, tug-of-war style of lock-up gameplay that the other games had. They even added a tug-of-war bar so you could actually see who was making progress on winning the lock-up and who needed to jam their finger harder into those hard buttons.
The game had quite a few options for how to play it. Traditional singles matches under one-fall rules, a Brawl that allowed anything to go and had no referee, and the classic Tournament mode these old games loved because what else could they offer? Taking a superstar and beating the entire roster to win the championship was always a fun time.
It still had tag team matches, and just like the singles matches, you could play them as a standard one-fall match, Brawl, or Tournament.
The Survivor Series match returned for eight-man tags, although technical limitations kept it to only one partner on the apron. I don’t think anyone cared about that as a kid. I sure as hell didn’t. And the elimination match type was always a personal favorite of mine growing up.
As a brief aside, I was excited when WWF started doing WarGames at Survivor Series a few years ago. Then they made it a yearly staple of Survivor Series, killed off the Survivor Series match, and pissed me off. Survivor Series should be a fun event filled with weird eight-man or eight-woman elimination matches, not two damn WarGames matches. But whatever, I’ll let Stinger rant about that one Friday in November. That’s what we in the business call a “promotional tease.”
WWF RAW also featured the Royal Rumble match type, because it would’ve been stupid to introduce the match type and then remove it in the next game just because it wasn’t titled Royal Rumble or Super Royal Rumble or The Greatest Royal Rumble. To the shock of no one, I hope, it was still a fun match to play in RAW and probably the match I played most often.
This game offered up two new game modes, which deserves some credit. They could’ve just added one and called it a day. We got the Bedlam match, which was a cross between Texas Tornado tag and elimination. Both members of each team were in the ring at once, and both had to be eliminated to win, so you could get the two-on-one handicap beatdown.
The second mode built on Bedlam and was called RAW Endurance. This could play out several ways but was built like a mix between Survivor Series and Bedlam. You picked a wrestler and then could pick five partners if you wanted to, or four or three or two or none, and you could either pick six wrestlers to fight against or let the CPU select them. And there was a difficulty option that went from 1 to 10. A thing I liked to do was a six-on-one handicap match.
Like Royal Rumble, this game also featured finishing moves. Yes, everyone had the same basic moveset, but at least they got their real finishers. Remembering how to do them back then was a piece of cake. Revisiting it before writing this, I didn’t have a damn clue how to do one. Sure as hell didn’t remember how to do the new mega moves, but I remember loving to do Doink’s back in the day, kicking them in the ass and over the top rope. Of course, I liked Doink’s top-rope Whoopee Cushion finisher, too.
Basically, Doink was awesome in this game, and I won’t tolerate slander of him.
Like I said, I played the SNES version, and that’s what this review is about. That means the roster I knew consisted of 1-2-3 Kid, Bam Bam Bigelow, Bret Hart, Diesel, Doink the Clown, Lex Luger, Luna Vachon, Owen Hart, Razor Ramon, Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, and Yokozuna. That’s a solid lineup, and I was happy with it as a kid. Looking back now, though, who made the decision to leave out Crush and Randy Savage but make them playable in the damn Game Gear version of the game?
I would say I understand why Randy Savage wasn’t in the game, but then this was released in November 1994, his WWF contract ended at the end of October, and he didn’t debut with WCW until December. Screw it. He’s not in it, and I’m not on the case of solving the mystery of why Randy Savage wasn’t in an SNES game in 1994 all the way in 2026.
And who thought to put Luna Vachon in the game? I thought Luna was a great wrestling character, but what’s the thought process behind, “Hey, we have room for twelve wrestlers, why not make one of them Luna Vachon?”
“Yeah, but this is the World Wrestling Federation, and we don’t do intergender matches…”
“Eh, screw it, she’s already in.”
WWF in 1994 had Adam Bomb, Tatanka, the Smoking Gunns, Aldo Montoya, Bob Backlund, the British Bulldog, the Steiner Brothers for a while, Fatu, among others. Hell, they could’ve included at least Alundra Blayze or Bull Nakano to have another female wrestler. And yes, I know, just because someone was on the roster that year doesn’t mean they were on the roster at the time the developers were making their roster. This is hypothetical.
Apologies, I only just realized I’m going off on an unnecessary tangent about a 32-year-old wrestling game’s roster and theory-crafting how it could’ve been better.
What more can be said about WWF RAW for the Super Nintendo? Is it the best wrestling game of all time? No, and it would be sad if it were, considering what year it is and when this came out. But was it the best wrestling game of all time at the time it released? You bet your ass it was.
Little eight-year-old me received this for Christmas in 1994, and I thought it was just the greatest thing ever. Super WrestleMania seemed ancient to me compared to the WWF’s New Generation. WWF RAW was more vibrant in its colors and presentation, had a better roster, more and better game modes, better sound, finishing moves, and mega moves. It had that kick-ass classic WWF RAW opening to start it off that made it feel like you were about to create your own episode of the Monday night show.
I played the hell out of this as a kid. WrestleMania: The Arcade Game was great, and we’ll probably get to it at some point, but this was my go-to wrestling game from 1994 until WCW released WCW vs. the World for PS1 in 1997, and especially WCW vs. nWo: World Tour for N64 later that year. That’s a solid three-year period where I wore WWF RAW slap out and did my fingers no favors by pressing the buttons out the back of the controller.
I’m not eight-year-old me anymore, so I can’t realistically give this five stars and say it’s still awesome. It’s fun for a bit, but repetitive and extremely basic in terms of actual wrestling. It’s not something I could sit and play again for hours a night, every night, for years like I once did. But I won’t discount my memories or the sheer amount of enjoyment I had with this game over hundreds of hours, and I’ll let my nostalgia dictate Titan’s Decree a little bit.
WWF RAW gets a four out of five: Commendable.
If you enjoyed this one, you might want to check out my review of WWF WrestleMania 2000 for N64 or Aladdin for Sega Genesis. You can check out the full Retro WedNESday collection by clicking here. And be sure to check out our newly launched Titan’s Game Guides directory. And be sure to drop a comment letting me know your thoughts on WWF RAW or suggesting a title for a future WedNESday!
