WWF WrestleMania 2000

Image Source: Amazon

Written By: Mark Armstrong

Publisher: THQ
Developer: AKI Corporation, Asmik Ace Entertainment (Natsume for GBC)
Genre: Wrestling
Series: N/A
Released: October 31 1999 (US) and October 12 1999 (UK)
Certificate: 15+ (Nowadays 16)
Consoles: N64 and GBC

It's hard to imagine in the modern wrestling world where one WWE videogame is released each year, and has been published by 2K Sports since 2013 (and THQ for a long time before that), but in the autumn of 1999, two major WWF games were released by two different publishers. Acclaim released the much-anticipated WWF Attitude in August/September of 1999 but, by then, the WWF had already agreed a deal for THQ to become its new videogame developer. Wasting no time, WrestleMania 2000 would be their first game, and it would hit stores in time for the final Christmas season of the millennium (which makes it sound really grand, doesn't it?).

This would mark the end of an era and the beginning of a new one; the Acclaim period had seen the WWF grow and improve its videogame output, but even the latter titles like War Zone and Attitude, whilst fun at the time, were far from flawless games and were mostly acceptable due to the WWF branding (see the subsequent ECW Hardcore Revolution, which was essentially an ECW version of Attitude, which didn't get great reviews). THQ, on the other hand, had built up a great deal of goodwill with its WCW games World Tour and, in particular, Revenge, which was released in late 1998 and, from a gameplay standpoint, blew any of Acclaim's titles away. So, one can understand why the WWF would enter into a working relationship with THQ, and why fans were hyped when news came out that THQ would be developing a WWF game, WrestleMania 2000 as a Nintendo 64 exclusive, for the first time.

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