Silent Rage in the Cage

In which I take far too much time looking at what is basically a badly made toy to analyse the decisions behind it.

Cards on the table, I like my old school wrestling, the human cartoon era never fails to raise a smile. Back in the day though my console of choice was the Megadrive so my fix for wrestling games would be the Flying Edge WWF titles. I knew that NES predecessors existed, but it would be many years later that I would pick them up as budget games for fun. The NES WWF games though? A bit too simplistic, with some very loose definitions of character variation. Aside from the first Wrestlemania Challenge (a Rare developed game that made the decision to make the WWF wrestlers CPU controlled in the main with you playing, erm, YOU) the first to really be what we'd call a 'modern' WWF style game was the WWF Steel Cage Challenge. Like its predecessor, this was an Acclaim production (this time contracted to Sculptured Software), but because Nintendo thought too many games coming out of one publisher was an indicator of poor quality, this was branded LJN, a subsidiary like Flying Edge). Aside from cookie-cutter characters and a general sponginess it was, well, reasonable for the time. Not really the sort of thing you'd imagine would be worthy of a full on celebratory rerelease in the HD era though. SPOILER: of course that's what happened.

Attention to detail in the product info, no?

MSI, a firm specialising in repackaging classic games as "Retro TV Arcades", namely an arcade joystick that plugs straight into the TV. Without getting 'too' technical, these use a souped up NES on a chip system from VR Technology - all above board thanks to expiring patents. It tends to come up in a lot of these kinds of consoles because it's cheap with a low power requirement and can be made to show some good quality graphics and sound over and above its original 8-bit origins. MSI games mostly uses its extra functionality to draw a nice title screen for MSI, and then runs the rest as standard NES code. I mention this all purely because of the sales sheet used to market the game:

Hmm...

The images in this show, from top to bottom, the actual unit hardware, an image of what looks like the Wrestlefest iOS app, and the title screen from the Master System version of the game. In other words, not a single accurate game screenshot is in the original brochure. The actual box itself is fine though. This rather eccentric mockup may tell us something about what is to follow. While Master System hardware for this form factor exists, it does so as part of a more expensive Mega Drive/Genesis emulator which would be better suited to running one of the later, more complex games.

If this was the only thing about this, there'd be no point in writing any more about it, but there's more to it than that. Let's take a look at the copyright screen for this new release, of what is meant to be a 1992 game.

OK, switching WWF for WWE makes sense, following the World Wildlife Fund settlement, but literally everything else has changed here. For reference, the original:

Hulk Hogan no longer appears in the new version of the game (although a lot of the Marvel licensing tangles had been resolved, with the other factors in Hogan's life around 2017, there's probably good reason to switch him out), and TitanSports are long gone, subsumed entirely into WWE. Everything else is blanked out and altered to remove specific references to Nintendo, and replace LJN and by association Acclaim with the new rights holder of Acclaim games, Throwback Entertainment. For what it's worth, Hulk Hogan is replaced with the Ultimate Warrior, and for some reason Jacques Rougeau in his persona of The Mountie has been switched with Scott Hall as Razor Ramon. It had been suggested that the real Mounties objected to Jacques' version of the same being a bad guy in the WWF, so this may be a factor in the revisit if the problem still lingered. At this point, as well as cost it starts to become clear what is going on here, with the need to change so much, and to use cheap hardware they were already familiar with, they decided to take the NES version and modify the code directly. This also helps me for what is to follow, as when the internal ROM is dumped, the NES portion can be read out and analysed in exactly the same way as you would with a ROM of the original game.

This is where things get awkward...

One hasty amendment to the graphics ROMs has switched the old WWF logo out for a variant of the current 'Old School' logotype for archive releases, with some arm tassels and a palette swap facilitating the grafting of Warrior's head on The Hulkster's body. Looking at the code at this point shows some variables seem to have been swapped purely to turn anything yellow on this screen green to save a bit of effort. With this in mind, I took the program ROM portion of the plug and play, and compared it, byte for byte with the USA release of the original game. I then took each change and analysed it to see precisely what each one did, to figure out what was going on.

The first major change here has been to hack out the initial game mode menu, as being able to select any 2 player mode is futile on a unit that only has controls for one player. A keen eye playing the game will see the little jump as the first menu is loaded empty and immediately switched for the second. 

More hacking to change the logo again and swap WWF for WWE, but the worst is yet to come. The actual character work is well done, with a lot of rewritten text to fix up the introductions (including correcting a typo where Roddy Piper is listed as coming from GlasCow*) and new portraits drawn based on other WWF games of the era, coupled with palette modification to make the new characters fit the bill. Once you know, you can see that the Warrior is effectively Hulk with more hair and green eyes to fake facepaint, while Razor is just The Mountie with a purple uniform as opposed to red, and more of a tan.

At this point, just watch it in action, courtesy of Haze, compared to the original played by NintendoComplete:

Note what happens when you select one of these new characters, the introduction text plays out to silence punctuated with rogue notes from something else. It seems that the Hulk Hogan and Mountie themes remain in the game assigned to the new characters, but set to 0 duration  so the default matchup theme will play on the select screen, and what should be silence plays on anything else. However, the sound driver used for these games doesn't support this fully so the sound glitches horribly.

You may have noticed I've talked about using other NES games for portrait inspiration, so why not take their music? Well, aside from the potential hassle of using work from different development studios, because of the way NES sound hardware worked, each developer tended to produce their own player and storage format, so there's no direct translation possible.

So, why would something go out to sale with bits missing in this manner? Presuming good intent here, was the work rushed to the point that they ran out of time or used the wrong build? Certainly there is some evidence to suggest that this was done, but not for the original release if these videos mean anything:

I've read since that there are two boxes out there for this game, the earlier ones having Randy Savage in a purple jacket and hat as opposed to green. The 'purple' version behaves in the manner I've just described, but clearly the advertised one now has the green photo, so is this a subtle revision indicator? Only one way to find out, let's get one in the other box and take a look...

First thing to note is the box (not pictured here) is much larger, and has a different production date (082018 instead of 092018), so this is apparently older, which is confusing when you load it up:

Yep, this has a copyright date of 2018, not 2017 - given the 25th anniversary excuse for this release, 2017 should be the date of release, so is this a revised edition?

Internally, it's very different to the other one, a fair bit of code pushed around, some different CHR tile arrangements and more importantly it weighs in as a 1MB Flash ROM, not a 2MB one as before. Closer inspection of the spare MB in the first is that it appears to be the entire content of a different MSI release, namely the NES port of Ms Pac-Man. The actual graphics are identical, and this one does feature the themes discussed above, and something a little stranger still when it comes to the player names.

So the non-theme version (and the original NES game) have The Undertaker, the new one removes the definite article. This seems to be purely to avoid showing up the fact that The Ultimate Warrior is too long a name to fit in the gap. They've actually taken this forward to the announcement screens as well, possibly a zealous find and replace which has led to some unfortunate placement issues where the white space for the THE is still included in the text and leaks outside of the speech bubble.

It's clear that this other version, despite being apparently older on the box has been worked on more heavily than the other, and with both boxes making it clear that the music has been licensed, it's difficult to suggest that any change was a legal issue. So, what do we have here? A game where the original marketing shots were for something different entirely, that is based on a legal hack of a 25 year old NES game that in theory seems to have got out of the door missing some of its content. The only conclusion I can draw given the wildly different packaging styles is that two separate production lines were used to make the units up, and both were given different master material for some reason (technical, legal or otherwise). It raises significant questions over quality control but it's certainly a strange tale.

*Yes, he's Canadian, but unbelievably the character is meant to be Scottish.