WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006 GM Mode Spotlight

YOKOHAMA, JAPAN--It's easy to see that the Yuke's development team behind THQ's WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006 is a thoroughly enthusiastic bunch of wrestling fanatics. They come to greet you wearing the paraphernalia of their favorite wrestlers, and if you ask them who their favorite WWE superstar is, you'll likely be treated to a thoughtful and impassioned answer; a response that is typically much more in-depth than what you might be used to.

Yuke's Talks WWE

Yuke's Kenji Nakamura talks GM mode in this exclusive interview.

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Consider the answer of SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006's season mode director Yoshio Togiya, whose favorite wrestler is Chris Benoit: "Chris Benoit used to wrestle with New Japan. Seeing him win championship in WrestleMania (20) almost brought tears of joy to my eye. Watching his career, from hard times in Japan up through his great success in the WWE, makes me feel kind of like a parent watching his child grow up and be successful."

This kind of fandom runs rampant throughout the Yuke's SmackDown! development team. Recently, we had a special opportunity to visit the Yuke's office in Yokohama to see firsthand how the team has been going about putting together the latest game in the SmackDown! series: WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006. The team has been working on the game since before the first SmackDown! vs. Raw game was released last year, and now that the game is in a nearly complete state, it's easy to be impressed with the amount of work and dedication the team has poured into the game.

Yuke's has been the sole developer of the SmackDown! games since the series' inception on the original PlayStation in 2000. Since that original game, with its fresh concepts and new takes on some staid wrestling traditions--most notably the introduction of a story mode (which was truly introduced in SmackDown! 2)--the developer has strived to continually push the development of the series in new directions. Story has since become a central feature in every subsequent SmackDown! game, and that is certainly the case in 2006. (For our look at the story mode in SVR 2006, read our most recent hands-on preview here).

The job of keeping the storyline straight in an ever-changing WWE world is not as easy for the Yuke's crew as you might think. While the WWE broadcasts both of its brand-name shows in Japan, as series director Taku Chihaya explained, the broadcasts are on a necessary three-week delay. "For the Japanese broadcast, because story is so important, [the WWE adds] subtitles--just like movies--on the Japanese broadcast, and of course that takes some time," Chihaya said. "So that's what accounts for the delay. And realistically, it is easier for us to understand the nuances of the story and what's going on when we have the subtitles there and not just the voice because, you know, we don't understand English well enough to get all of that. So the delay is just something we have to live with."

Still, as Chihaya points out, the team has ways of keeping up with the latest title and storyline changes. "Especially in the later part of the project, we need to keep up with developments as quickly as they happen because we want to have the game be as current as possible," Chihaya said. "So one example being every year's summer PPVs, we don't know what the arenas are going to look like [until] they've actually had the PPV. In that case we need to get the information really quickly, so we ask THQ to record events for us and send them to us. We also check WWE.com to see who's been fired, who changed their costume, and stuff like that; and try to keep up with the latest information so we can have the game be as current as possible."

Watching Chris Benoit become a champion has been a special treat for one Yuke's developer.

When it came time to write the basic storyline for the SVR 2006, the Yuke's team worked closely with a team of WWE scriptwriters to ensure authenticity. In fact, the entire plotting process is a collaboration between Yuke's, THQ, and the WWE to make sure the most popular wrestlers are being showcased at the right time when the game comes out.

Last year's SmackDown! vs. Raw game was the first wrestling game to feature online play. The Yuke's development team responsible for putting together the online feature set for last year's game and SVR 2006 don't downplay the initial difficulty the team experienced while trying to make online play work. "The biggest problem we had was that we had online play working fine here, within the Internet environment we have here at the office," said Shintaro Matsubara, technical director at Yuke's. "But when we took the game over to America for testing and used it with real ISPs and a wide variety of ISPs in the states, we found the game didn't work at all in some cases, and we had lots of problems with performance as well. We were really worried about whether we would be able to get online, basically functioning or not, when we saw how many problems we were having in the real environment." Still, the team managed to overcome those initial difficulties and has returned this year with a game whose slate of online features is far more fleshed out than last year's effort--including approximately 70 different match types playable online for up to four players. "We had some new, different problems this year," Matsubara said, "but basically, the experience we had last year helped us deal with them much better."