7. Starting with a few videos depicting horror movie stars wrestling, it spawned a legion of imitators and leagues attempting to push the envelope further.
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The most well-known today is the VGCW, or Video Game Championship Wrestling. Starting in 2012, using the wrestling game WWE 2K13, a person under the guise Bazza McMahon started broadcasting live shows using a capture card, filled with video game and pop-culture characters like Zangief, former SEGA mascot Segata Sanshiro and Dragonball Z character Mr. Satan.
The diversity of the cast alone is impressive. Just to illustrate, here is a GIF of Professor Layton, a humble puzzle-solving man, giving a fierce chop to the dome of indie darling Shovel Knight.
GIF
What started as a few one-off promotional matches became seasons, which thrived thanks to a culture it built up around itself. Jokes about 窶弋HQuality窶? would flood the chat whenever bugs occurred, and word of new streams would spread across forums and message boards. The advent of live-streaming was a huge boon to the VGCW, as from the beginning, fans began to discuss, cheer and in some cases even steer plot threads for the league窶冱 fictional pantheon.
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In season one, a Money In The Bank ladder match spurred controversy among the viewership. When the match started, the AI for the other combatants in the arena focused on each other, leaving Zangief as the sole wrestler fixated on the briefcase at the top of the ladder. He walked over, climbed up and grabbed it immediately, ending the match. Bazza didn窶冲 think this was good television, so he declared a rematch, and Little Mac of Punch-Out fame was left victorious.
Gief faces down the authority.
Rather than just clap and go along with it, fans dubbed it the 窶彜oviet Screwjob,窶? saying Bazza was out to champion Little Mac, speculating if Mac was in McMahon窶冱 pocket. Bazza pushed this further, using the Create-A-Story feature in WWE 2K13 to develop the feud between the wronged Zangief and the company favorite Mac using cutscenes and interstitial promos.
Zangief complained about being 窶徭crewed窶? in a promo, followed by a surprise backstage brawl between him and Mac that left the former beaten. A grudge match was held between the two, but an avatar of Bazza played ref, and a few dirty moves from Little Mac secured him a win. In a series of escalating events, Zangief joined forces with Legend of Zelda villain Ganondorf to form Gerudo Skies, a tag-team that would face Bazza McMahon and Little Mac in the ring for a match where the corporate forces would finally be overthrown.
In a climactic bout between Zangief and Little Mac, in a 30-Minute Inferno Iron Man Match, Little Mac emerged victorious. Bazza窶冱 avatar rushed the ring with a chair, telling Mac to teach Zangief a permanent lesson; Mac refused and threw the chair back, and the two settled their feud. (Little Mac was later seen in the parking lot, being hit by a mysterious black car.)
Seriously, this actually happened.
While the initial spectacle draws you in, the storylines that these creators craft around both chat response and their own ideas fills wikis, and they still broadcast semi-regularly to this day. Currently running the broadcast is Brian Ballard, who alongside a team of creatives, develops new programs and series to flesh out the league. The aforementioned diversity of characters has to be balanced out by fan favorites, and the console version only allowed so many characters. Developmental leagues soon sprang up, ran by community members to build personalities and faces for primetime.
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Though the scale has increased, many things remain the same. Even the game is still a dated WWEﾂ?2k14, as according to Ballard, newer titles haven窶冲 offered the same tools for crafting cutscenes or provided the variety of events that his team likes to cover. As for the storylines, they窶决e still going strong.
窶廝ack when Bazza ran things, there were a lot of weird ideas, plenty of which were a little too out there for Bazza,窶? Ballard told us. 窶廩e would run with some of them, but usually the big season-long stuff came from his own ideas. I窶况e been trying to carry on similarly.窶?
GIF
Ballard has hosted a litany of new programs since he took over from Bazza in June 2015, and in the years since that fateful match between Zangief and Little Mac, VGCW has reached greater and greater heights. Promoted by Twitch and featured in a poster in Octodad: Dadliest Catch, VGCW has spread into multiple divisions and even a reality show, where popular characters live in a house in The Sims 3.
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Despite all that, VGCW窶冱 future looks a little tenuous. The community has dealt with two server shutdowns, and with the most recent one, a month窶冱 notice was all the league had prior to the shutdown of WWE 2k14's servers. Ballard and his team had to download as many characters as they could, and are essentially operating with a fixed roster.
窶弩e can still use the in-game character creator, but we can窶冲 get new characters from our community anymore,窶? said Ballard. 窶廣nd our community窶冱 been very talented at making characters, they窶况e done some seriously impressive work. From the intricate details on Ganondorf to the freakish monsters like Ridley, people have made all sorts of characters with this, probably well beyond what the 2K14 devs must have thought was possible.窶?
VGCW may soon be without a showrunner as well. Ballard is planning to step down at the conclusion of the 13th season finale, End Game X3, taking place on May