Developed/Published by: TRY / Nintendo
Released: 21/10/1986
Completed: 05/04/2025
Completion: Defeated The Great Puma!

Nintendo’s output on the fledgling Famicom/NES is… patchy. And nowhere is it more patchy than when it came to video game representations of sport, where they can somehow manage to literally solve golf game design and then months later be willing to put their name on things like Soccer and Volleyball, which are, frankly, absolutely horrendous. Even with Nintendo warming up by late 1986–they’ve just put out Metroid, for example–you can’t help but expect Pro Wrestling to be a bit of a dog, considering the sport (or at least, sport-adjacent entertainment) has a lot of terrible, lazy video games to its name, and this specific release is most famous in gaming circles for having a win screen that declares “A winner is you!” which probably was funny once.

Well, it isn’t a dog! A bit like how Nintendo lucked into working with Satoru Iwata on Golf, with Pro Wrestling they also managed to hire someone who knew exactly what the fuck they were doing: Masato Masuda.

Masato Masuda–who passed away in 2014 at the untimely age of 48, sadly–is best known by the wrestling hardcore as the creator of Fire Pro Wrestling, generally considered the greatest and most important wrestling video game franchise (even by people who love AKI’s wrestling games like me) and according to an interview in CONTINUE Pro Wrestling was made “mostly by [himself]” with “someone else who did the graphics.”

Although not a sport that would see as many games released as, say, golf, wrestling was reaching its zenith in popularity worldwide, so before Pro Wrestling there were several high profile releases from Sega and Technos that I’m sure Masuda will have tried, and two wrestling games would appear before this on Famicom: Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E. and Tag Team Wrestling (both of which would appear on the NES before Pro Wrestling, too.)

So–not having played any of those–I can’t make any educated claims that Masuda was “solving” anything about wrestling games with Pro Wrestling. But whatever prior art existed for him to pull from, Masuda understood a few things:

• Pro wrestling is about unique characters.
• Pro wrestling is about grappling–and the wide range of moves that result.
• Pro wrestling isn’t about winning or losing–it’s about ebb and flow.

Now, I won’t pretend that Pro Wrestling clicked for me immediately. It has the immediate problem of any 2D games where you can move in and out of the screen–not being exactly sure where you need to be to connect with attacks–and the systems by design are a little obscure. Succeeding in pulling off moves from grapples can feel a bit random, too. Does initiating the grapple confer advantage? Does it even track who initiates? Actually, how do you initiate a grapple? Is it timing? I’m button bashing, but sometimes I don’t go as hard and still win?

As far as I can tell–from nosing around a bit–the game relies on a stamina system with regeneration, with lots of “triggers” based on stamina levels. So you’re basically trying to wear down your opponent’s stamina enough that they don’t get up long enough so you can pin them, but if you’re slow–or they start beating you up, their stamina recovers.

(This matters because as you play through the game, enemies seem to gain stamina and regenerate faster.)

The genius of this system is that it ties into the ebb and flow of a “real” wresting match perfectly. You have to wear down your opponent to pull off bigger moves, but they can also suddenly go on a tear by kicking you in the face before you manage the grapple you’ve been building towards. You can misjudge when to pin, get a kick out, and have the entire match turn on its head. And vice versa! If a match isn’t going well, it’s can sometimes only take a single correct move to swing the momentum back.

Pro Wrestling also features, well, all the actual features of a wrestling match. Not only is the referee who has to run into position, you can jump of the turnbuckle, throw your opponent out of the ring and then leap onto them, get ring outs, and so on. The building blocks are all there for every match to tell a story.

This is aided, of course, by the game’s memorable characters such as Star Man and The Amazon (famously inspiring Blanka.) Each character has individual special moves–the Amazon’s all illegal moves that can end with him begging innocence to the referee, amusingly–and are inspired by real wrestlers. Fighter Hayabusa is transparently based on Antonio Inoki for example, though Giant Panther will always be debated–I suspect he’s actually based on Fritz Von Erich, the patriarch of the Von Erich family due to the use of the Iron Claw, that he famously feuded with Inoki and that it doesn’t look like any of his sons–but that’s pure conjecture.

But the point is that with whichever character you choose, there’s something special to work for, and it adds to the narrative you create through play–you survive the Amazon cheating like crazy, pull off the iron claw and pin! The crowd goes wild!

I won’t lie–often when I’m playing these older games, I’m sort of just… working through them like a job. But Pro Wrestling? I just played it! Once I was comfortable with how it played, I settled on King Slender (the Ric Flair analogue) because he had an easy move to pull off (the backbreaker–he’s the only character with a move you can pull off by pressing A only from a grapple) and had fun until I hit a genuine brick wall.

Pro Wrestling isn’t a long game–it’s built around winning five matches to become the VWA champion, then ten title defenses until you take on “Great Puma” to become VWA/VWF champion–three loops of the roster. But by the third loop your opponents are unstoppable–they regenerate stamina quickly, pull of grapples faster. I couldn’t go any further.

And really, that’s ultimately Pro Wrestling’s weakness–it all works up to a point, and then as a player you have to go “ok, how can I cheese this.”

For me, that was starting again with Fighter Hayabusa, abusing his “Back Brain Kick” and ring-outs. While it’s not a guarantee, if you can get your opponent on the mat and then position yourself right (Hayabusa’s midriff around where your opponent’s body is lying) you should be able to kick them in the head as soon as they stand up, and spamming this at the start will alow you to either start pulling off grapples or let you throw them out of the ring and then just run them into the barriers till they can’t get up quickly enough.

It would be some demoralising, terrible wrestling for the audience, but at least for me it’s what I had to resort to for the last chunk of matches.

However–that’s if you’re determined to beat this (maybe you have a blog or something where you’ve tied yourself to doing that.) I assume most players who played this either just had fun playing a wrestling career–it does track wins and losses, and you can just play it–or took part in two-player matches, where all the obscurites of stamina and grappling probably lead to absolutely epic battles. I certainly haven’t played a better two-player game on NES or Famicom by this point in 1986–and I may not for a while!

Will I ever play it again? Unlikely, but not impossible!

Final Thought: A funny and strange fact about “A Winner Is You” is that it isn’t even the original win quote. Seems that in the original release of this it just said “Winner Is You” and in a later revision they “fixed” the English by just sticking an A at the beginning.

Which is a really strange fix! You’d assume someone who actually spoke English might have pointed out that’s not better–and it’s not like “You Win!” has a character limit or something.

The fix also seems to have changed a “bug”–that if you play King Slender it takes longer to get to the first championship. This was something I didn’t mind and originally assumed was “balance” because King Slender’s back breaker seems so powerful–though when I got later in the game and realised I could basically never pull it off, my opinion on that changed somewhat…