Pro-wrestling, for the longest time, has possessed absolutely zero shame over borrowing liberally from the world of popular culture. It’s not so much a magpie approach of selecting shinies and making their nest appealing, but the Ronnie Briggs method of stealing a bloody great train and driving it, without subtlety, straight at the audience.
Over the years, several of the industry’s most successful gimmicks have been directly lifted from TV, movies, and music. The Honkytonk Man was, quite obviously, an Elvis impersonator. Razor Ramon was Tony Montana with a toothpick. And Sting’s elaborate and critically-acclaimed reinvention, which saw him glumly hang from the rafters like a confused scorpion (he thought he was a bat)?
Brandon Lee was doing that years earlier in cult goth-classic The Crow.
It makes perfect sense. If something works amongst mainstream media, it’s almost guaranteed to have an impact in a wrestling ring. So it’s a little strange, then, that in spite of it being the fastest growing entertainment medium of the past three decades, wrestling has barely tapped into the world of video gaming.
In fact, examples are extremely slight, what with the business being traditionally behind the curve. Even in the few cases where wrestling – and in particular, WCW – tried to exploit gaming’s popularity, they had their finger on the pulse after it had went dead.
