Make no mistake, the entire level of investing 4 years of growth in WrestleQuest is as a result of Mega Cat Studios needed to make an old-school, turn-based role-playing sport, like the unique Last Fantasy, or Earthbound, or the Dragon Quest collection.
However that doesn’t imply Mega Cat is solely exploiting professional wrestling’s online game enchantment with an easier-to-develop gameplay loop; there’s a whole lot of childhood love for the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties superstars inside WrestleQuest, too. And there are 30 of them from actual life — like Jake the Snake Roberts, Diamond Dallas Web page, and, most primarily, Macho Man Randy Savage.
“We’re a hardcore sports activities city,” Mega Cat founder James Deighan mentioned of Pittsburgh, the place he grew up and the place the studio is predicated. “Pals, household, co-workers would come over to argue concerning the Steelers sport, or the Penguins, or the Pirates, my dad was extra a fan of Bruno Sammartino,” the champion of the primordial World Wide Wrestling Federation of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies.
“I believe he really watched that trade come to life,” Deighan mentioned of his father. Deighan and the youthful of his six brothers have been born later in his dad’s life, in his 50s. “A few of my favourite recollections of my childhood are throughout wrestling. I bear in mind extra about my wrestling toys,” than different sports activities.
It makes for an sudden wrinkle in WrestleQuest’s story. The characters — 12 of them playable, 400 of them NPCs, and about 30 of these real-life, old-school heroes from the previous 40 years — are all action-figure representations. Some aren’t even wrestlers. The world by which the primary protagonist “Muchacho Man” lives is a fantasy realm of toys, the sort a middle-schooler would unfold out on the bed room ground and mash up in wonderful crossover, non-canonical throwdowns.
“One thing that’s impressed us, closely, is a whole lot of us grew up not having a ton of issues,” Deighan informed Polygon. “So generally, the G.I. Joe and the He-Man characters are within the ring with Hulk Hogan, and that bout performs out, and that ended up inspiring this sort of WrestleQuest universe.”
In WrestleQuest, launching Aug. 8 on every little thing (together with cell, by way of Netflix), gamers discover a fantasy realm dotted with gyms, arenas, and even shrines to the legends of yesteryear. Fight takes place within the ring (often) and follows a well-recognized turn-based cadence, with wrestling strikes and motion factors nimbly taking the place of spells and mana. Land a very devastating transfer from the highest rope, and a man’s plastic arm would possibly pop off. No worries, he simply sticks it again on.
“That’s a part of the excessive fantasy playfulness,” Deighan mentioned. “What impressed the sport is that very same sense, these two toys are simply gonna go arduous in that ring. And one in every of them within the locker room afterward, perhaps what he’s doing is twisting his face again round, as a result of he’s a toy.
“That is all a part of why we needed to make video games within the first place, and why we began Mega Cat,” he added. “As somebody who’s had such an enormous reverence for RPGs, we needed to make it possible for we have been able to decide to one thing that we predict followers would need to play, and the time wanted to stability and modify, one thing that has that a lot content material. It’s an enormous design problem.”
WrestleQuest is the biggest sport his 11-year-old studio has tried, Deighan mentioned. A lot of Mega Cat’s résumé to this point has been work-for-hire initiatives, a few of them utilizing licensed properties (most just lately, Renfield: Convey Your Personal Blood, a Vampire Survivors-alike based mostly on the Nicolas Cage film). These experiences gave Mega Cat some construction to work with as they approached the managers and estates of real-life wrestling stars. Nevertheless it was nonetheless a pitch for them to signal on to a way-out-there idea.
“It isn’t the identical expertise speaking to Jake the Snake as it’s speaking to Hasbro’s model workforce and licensing agent,” Deighan chuckled.
At first, a lot of the wrestlers and their brokers have been solely within the deal phrases. “Most of them weren’t notably enthusiastic about the kind of sport or the element of the sport,” Deighan mentioned. However he and Mega Cat did discover frequent floor in discussions with the likes of Web page, and Jeff Jarrett, early on of their marketing campaign to enroll superstars.
“Nearly each wrestler within the sport needed to have their very own indie circuit [wrestling] begin,” Deighan mentioned. “In lots of instances, these of us are of their 50s, 60s, and 70s. And so they don’t know what indie video games are, however they positively know what indie wrestling is. I believe a few of them felt like they have been additionally propping us up, and being part of that form of journey, as a result of they knew that this was a giant threat for the workforce and a real love letter. A whole lot of occasions, it impressed some distinctive conversations with them, sharing their very own points they’d of their journey, after they have been on the come-up, which is fairly relatable.”
The love letter sentiment could be discovered all through WrestleQuest, even when the toys-and-rasslers building is extra of a way than the top, creatively talking. The purpose of WrestleQuest, all the time, was to do a turn-based, party-up, story-heavy RPG first. However as Deighan and his Mega Cat colleagues leaned into their work over the previous 4 years, they stored discovering issues to have a good time from their childhoods and fandoms. The result’s they’re making the sport they all the time needed to make, and utilizing cherished childhood recollections to make it.
“The sport content material was knowledgeable extra by the love for JRPGs, and wrestling, than it was for the most effective business plan,” Deighan mentioned. “It’s most likely a sport that might have been 30% of its ultimate dimension, and viable. The explanation so many individuals labored on it for a few years was due to that purpose. How we’re measuring the success of WrestleQuest isn’t purely a business factor. It’s most likely the third or fourth purpose.”
WrestleQuest launches Aug. 8 on Nintendo Swap, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Collection X.