Kevin Gill
Lead Designer/Eidos Interactive

Why Backyard Wrestling?

Interactive environments will be a big part of Backyard Wrestling.

Backyard Wrestling was chosen because it's a multicultural, multinational, home video, DVD, and pay-per-view juggernaut around the world. It has successfully captured the imaginations of wrestling fans and casual video game players from around the world. Backyard Wrestling delivers the "Holy S***" factor of pro wrestling, complete with over-the-top stunts, flamboyant characters, and unique combat environments, all driven by a killer 41 song soundtrack. Timing also played a big part though. This isn't a few years back--when the ECW, WCW, and WWF were thriving and drawing turn-away crowds. Take a look at the wrestling business in America today. The pro wrestling industry in America is now a monopoly, controlled by a former billionaire who's desperately trying to recapture his glory days. He's completely alienating his core fans, and he's always shoving his untalented family down everyone's throats. Meanwhile, people are tuning out in droves. When we had the chance to team up with the visionaries at Backyard Wrestling ("BYW"), who are responsible for shaking up the genre and giving the industry a kick in the pants, we jumped at it.

We were drawn to the license and style of BYW because of the unprecedented freedom it offered in terms of environmental interaction and gameplay. While most video game genres continue to evolve and innovate, from gameplay and design perspectives, the developers of wrestling games have essentially been churning out the same game for many years. The games really do lack true innovation. A huge reason for this is because the developers of wrestling games are forced to re-create a television show and are unable to use their imaginations to make the genre better. We saw Backyard Wrestling as something that completely captured the "magic" of pro wrestling and offered a huge crossover appeal to the casual gamer. We look at it as "all killer, no filler." We give the player the complete freedom to explore and destroy the environment, while allowing the sickest moves imaginable. We let players pick up and use countless weapons, and they inflict real-time damage to their opponents. Additionally, all the action is set against an imaginative environmental backdrop.

The brutal action in Backyard Wrestling is pretty intense.

The challenges revolved around the fact that a game like this has truly never been made before. You've always been confined to a ring and forced to adhere to rules. To give players the complete freedom to explore and use the environment any way they want took a lot of time to conceive and design. The first thing we did was sit down and brainstorm about the environments you could fight in, the weapons you could use, how you would be able to use the weapons, and, of course, the characters you could control/play. The engine and the tools that were used had to be revamped from a one-on-one fighting game to make the environment interactive. All the basic systems, but especially the camera, had to be worked on extensively to support the "go anywhere" gameplay. We experimented with a lot of control types, seeing what worked best. The overly complicated system of meters and extensive button combinations didn't feel right, so we opted for a more pick-up-and-play style. The damage system was also a real challenge, as we wanted it to offer various degrees of damage that could occur on different parts of the body. It took a lot of work to get right--and more importantly--it took a lot of work to get it balanced. When you consider that most of this stuff came from our imaginations, you realize that there was no groundbreaking game we were trying to emulate. We were trying to break new ground ourselves.