While WWE 2K17 may be the one big wrestling game most fans know about, wrestling promotion CHIKARA and VICO Game Studio are looking to change that. CHIKARA Action Arcade Wrestling will be the first licensed CHIKARA wrestling game, and after its Indiegogo campaign the team at VICO hopes it will offer a change of pace from what’s available to gamers right now.
One of the biggest goals David Horn, Producer and Creator of CAAW , has for the game isn’t to make a better wrestling game than his competition, but to make something altogether different. “I'm not one of those angry developers shaking his fist saying ‘We deserve a better wrestling game!! I'll show you how it's done!!’ Quite the contrary,” he said. “I have nothing but respect for the awesome work 2K is doing as well as the old N64 and PlayStation simulation wrestling games. I just want to make something different.”
Horn draws a comparison to what the gaming scene used to look like for football games. “I want CAAW to be the the go-to arcade wrestling compliment to those games when you might be in the mood for a more NFL Blitz-style arcade interpretation of wrestling,” he said.
Horn isn’t a stranger to making wrestling games either. He had already released Action Arcade Wrestling 1 & 2 and was working on the third one when the deal with CHIKARA came about. “I had no intentions of reaching out to any promotions at the time,” he said. “I was just trying make a really fun arcade game - this time in a decent engine.” The problem with his game was that he had no licenses to work with, so he had no star power.
“The drawback to that, of course, was that I was going to have to create made-up wrestlers for the roster. Nobody, including myself, was going to want to play as those characters,” Horn said.
Once a few demo clips had been seen by CHIKARA, the promotion approached VICO Game Studio about working together. “They had seen some of the videos I put up of my early work-in-progress,” Horn told iDigi. “They saw that I was going for more of a fun fast arcade style as opposed to a slower simulation. I think they thought that my style was very much in line with their brand of over-the-top, comic book, super hero style performances.” It wasn’t long after that the two came to an agreement.
Working with CHIKARA is the perfect fit for CAAW, said Horn. “I don't think any other promotion would give me this kind of balance between popularity of the actual promotion and creative flexibility,” he said. “Promotions as popular as the WWE would be very strict (I would imagine) about the representation of their brand whereas a very small one wouldn't care so much... but nobody might know of them.” Horn says CHIKARA still has some say in what happens, but he likes the guidelines he’s been given. “I'm very honored to have been trusted enough to represent their brand in this form of media and I take that responsibility very seriously,” he said.
Another big help this time around is using Unreal Engine 4. “With the previous versions of engines coupled with the Xbox Live Indie environment, it was like trying to fit a basketball inside of a golf hole,” Horn said. “We did SO much just to get Action Arcade Wrestling 1 & 2 even on that platform, it really took away from the actual game-mechanics work.”
Times have changed, and the process is now much easier. “We're spending less time on things like memory management and more on actual gameplay decisions and fun features,” Horn said.
This is also the first time Horn has used crowdfunding to help with development. “I made the first game totally by myself in my spare time,” he said. “The second, I used some of the funds from the first game.” Since CAAW is looking to be much more ambitious, bigger goals require bigger budgets. And the speed of Indiegogo donations directly impacts the pace of development. Of course, CAAW will be made regardless of how much is raised but it’s difficult to forecast a release window given the circumstances. .
“We currently work on the game in our spare time,” Horn said. “The more money our campaign generates, the more full-time development we can put into the game and the sooner it will be released. If we make $0, we still will make the game... although the release date would probably be pretty far out there.”
You can contribute to CHIKARA Action Arcade Wrestling by donating to the Indiegogo campaign right here. The game is set for release on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
So what do you think? Will you be supporting the development of CHIKARA Action Arcade Wrestling? Are you interested to see a more arcade-inspired wrestling game again? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
