The Big Pro Wrestling / Tag Team Wrestling (1983)

Is ‘frantic menu-selection’ a genre?

Technically, this isn’t the first ever pro-wrestling video game – that honour falls to the obscure The Puroresu, for Bandai’s 8-bit home computer, the RX-78 Gundam. However, for most historians, The Big Pro Wrestling (Tag Team Wrestling in the west) is the place where it all started.

Developed by Technos Japan, and published by Data East, this arcade game was released in Japan in December 1983.

Despite some internal misgivings during development, the game was a reasonably-sized hit. It also introduced a number of features that would go on to be staples of the genre, including ring entrances (with entrance music), outside interference, ringside-brawling, and tag-team cut-play.

A seminal title, no doubt … but does it hold up to scrutiny today?

Presentation

As the western name suggests, we’re dealing with tag-team matches only – no singles matches. We are quickly introduced to the 4 main characters: the player-controlled Gemini Brothers (Terry and Sunny) and the CPU-controlled heels, Mad Bull Giant and Bloody Mask.

The Gemini Brothers are obviously inspired by The Funks (Terry and Dory Jr), although they also have a great deal in common with Japanese superstar Antonio Inoki, particularly in terms of mannerisms and moves.

The heel team bear more than a passing resemblance to Andre the Giant and The Destroyer. However, the most shameless look-a-like can be found when the heels’ sword-wielding ally makes a rare appearance: the turban-wearing Violence Ceasar Singh is a very obvious knock-off of Tiger Jeet Singh.

As you’ll have gathered from this cast of characters, The Big Pro Wrestling is unlicensed. However, curiously the name-entry screen (in both the Japanese and western releases) states that the game is “Approved by New Japan Pro and All Japan Pro“. In case one thinks this might be a verbal sleight-of-hand, the Japanese promotional flyer goes one further and makes clear that the approval comes from “New Japan Pro Wrestling and All Japan Pro Wrestling“.

Rumour has it that the president of Technos Japan received some sort of vague approval from a person connected to the two wrestling promotions, but it’s very questionable whether that individual had the necessary authority. Indeed, a further 10 years would pass before the first official New Japan and All Japan video games.

Having said that, there’s not a great deal in the game that is connected to either company, other than the various Inoki-isms that are sprinkled throughout.

On that point, the Gemini Brothers go down in history as the first video game wrestlers to enjoy a ring-entrance, replete with theme music. They come out to a brazen rip-off of Mandrill / Michael Masser’s “Ali’s Theme / Ali Bombaye”, instantly recognizable to Japanese audiences as Inoki’s theme music.

Pre-match, the scene is further set with the presentation of flowers. As the ring announcer introduces the babyfaces, they throw their jackets into the air, while the dastardly heels whisper and plot in the other corner.

The audio is impressive for a game from 1983. Other than the aforementioned entrance music and some frenzied crowd noise, there is a smattering of synthesized speech to bring things to life. The heels shout “Come on!” at various intervals and your wrestlers give a very obvious Inoki-esque “Daa!” when they land moves.

Throw in a packed and excitable crowd, the commentators at ringside, a pair of press photographers and a cameraman, and it all adds up to a charming representation of late 1970’s / early 1980’s Japanese pro-wrestling.

Then the bell sounds and away we go…

Gameplay

It’s worth remembering that, in late 1983, the fighting genre was still very much in its infancy.

The seminal Karate Champ (Karate Dō in Japan) wouldn’t be released for another six months. It would be a further six months after that before the snappy kicks and punches of Kung Fu Master (Spartan X) revolutionized the concept of fighting games. 

We end up with the slightly odd scenario where we have two buttons that are used almost entirely for ‘menu navigation’, rather than for kicks, punches or grabs. 

As the wrestlers move around the screen, you’ll notice that their arms are raised for a while … then the arms drop down by their side, with the timing seemingly at random. Ignore the human player’s arms: they’re a red-herring. It’s the CPU’s arms that are relevant.

When the two in-ring wrestlers collide with each other, we move into a collar-and-elbow tie-up.

The gameplay revolves around maneuvering yourself so that you collide with the CPU while their hands are down by their sides. If you manage this, you’ll have the advantage and can perform a grapple move (using a menu-based system).

If the CPU has their hands in the air when you collide with them, we have a collar-and-elbow stalemate – with the player having to pull-away to attempt a re-engagement. Failure to pull away quickly enough will give the CPU the advantage and they’ll perform a grapple move.

When the player has the upper hand in one of these collar-and-elbow tie-ups, a menu appears on screen.  You then have a 3-second countdown (about 2 seconds in “real time”) to tap Button 2 to cycle through the available moves, with the moves later in the list generally being more powerful. 

When you’ve highlighted a move that you’re happy with, pressing Button 1 performs the move. If the timer expires before you select a move, the opponent reverses the collar-and-elbow tie-up and performs a move on you. As such, the reward of going for the bigger moves (appearing later in the menu) is balanced against the risk of the timer expiring before you reach and select that move.

If you fail to lock-up with the CPU for a while, the AI opponent will fly into a rage (turning red) and at that point they move directly towards you to catch you in an unavoidable and punishing grapple. As you get further into the game, the CPU affords you less and less time before activating this furious state.

A Power bar is displayed on screen showing your current wrestler’s health. This not only depletes when you receive moves, but also reduces when you perform moves yourself, an early attempt at simulating stamina.

As the Power bar lowers, your movement speed slows. Tagging your partner allows the new man to take over in the ring.

The move animations, while simplistic, would have been instantly recognizable to Japanese gamers.

These include Terry Funk’s Western Jab combo, Antonio Inoki’s Enzuigiri and Cobra Twist and Stan Hansen’s Western Lariat. We also get a great Karl Gotch-inspired German Suplex. The crowd roars and sweat flies through the air as the moves connect, giving some visceral punch to proceedings.

It’s also possible to achieve a submission victory by applying the Cobra Twist to Bloody Mask when his Power is low. Submission victories are something that many later wrestling games wouldn’t even try to simulate.

Of note too is the rudimentary ‘cut-play’ on show: attempt the Cobra Twist too early in the match and Mad Bull Giant will storm into the ring to break up the move.

The movesets for each member of the face team are identical, while the heels (who do not have to navigate the menu system) have their own selection of moves.

For the human player, attempting the more powerful moves (the Piledriver onwards) on the larger Mad Bull Giant character leads to an automatic reversal. This is the first example of ‘weight detection’ in a wrestling game, another innovative first.

If a grapple move is performed near the ropes, the action can spill out to floor. At that point, not only does the view change, but so does the gameplay mechanic. Movement is restricted to the horizontal plane and now there’s no stalemate: connecting with the CPU when their arms are raised will lead to an automatic grapple defeat, adding an additional layer of jeopardy. Ringside, the move-menu is also reduced to three new moves: an Inoki-style Knuckle Arrow punch, a Giant Baba-style Brain Chop, and an attack where you ram your opponent into the ring post. Count-outs are possible and the CPU is not afraid to exploit that strategy.

In a fun twist, when you’re battling at ringside, there’s a chance that Violence Ceasar Singh will make an appearance. Rampaging through the crowd, he sends audience members and chairs flying before thrashing your hapless wrestler with his sword. It’s yet more evidence that the developers were true fans of Japanese pro-wrestling and it’s an impressive technical achievement – interference wouldn’t resurface in a wrestling game until 1989’s Fire Pro Wrestling Combination Tag.

Pressing button 1 when the CPU opponent is prone will allow you to attempt a pin. When a fallen wrestler has no Power left, their opponent automatically goes for a pinfall. In that situation, there are no kick-outs or near-falls: the 3-count is inevitable.

The referee gives an excitably high-pitched “one, two, THWEEEEE!” at the climax of the match. This same cadence would be re-used a couple of years later by the ref in Technos Japan’s Exciting Hour / Mat Mania.

If you win a match, you collect a trophy or belt (together with a point bonus depending on how quickly you secured the win) before you move on to the next match … against exactly the same opponents.

If you manage to achieve 10 wins in a row, you are crowned the “World Champion” – the news is delivered via some wholly underwhelming text on screen. However, the matches keep coming in an endless 255-match loop.

Player v Player battles are not possible, but two humans can play co-operatively against the CPU. In the cocktail table version of the game, tagging-out will flip the screen 180 degrees so that the player sitting on the other side of the table-top gets the ‘normal’ perspective.

Analysis

There’s no doubt that The Big Pro Wrestling is borne out of a deep love for Japanese pro-wrestling. The presentation evokes so much of that particular era: fans filing into the arena on a summer night, ring entrances, announcers, interference, cut play, and the classic tag team struggle between good and evil.

However, the gameplay has not aged particularly well. The key game mechanic involves using the joystick to try to collide with your opponent while their arms are down.

In practice, you often end up in a stalemate position when you lock-up. You then have to quickly disengage and re-engage, hoping that the arm position of your opponent will change.

Even when exploiting that strategy, the AI becomes increasingly unreasonable and frustrating as the matches progress, often dashing away and then flying into a rage before it’s possible to win a grapple. The percentage of time that the CPU keeps their arms by their side also reduces as the player collects victories.

The menu-based grapple system is also a limiting factor.

It’s an interesting solution to a key conceptual issue with wrestling games: how do you allow players to perform a wide variety of moves when you’re limited to a couple of buttons?

A menu system is perhaps an obvious (albeit crude) way around this problem. However, it’s unsurprising that Technos Japan abandoned this mechanism for their subsequent wrestling games. It would make a reappearance in Sega’s poor 1985 effort, Champion Pro-Wrestling, before disappearing from the genre completely. The aggression, struggle and drama of combat is poorly simulated by selecting items from a menu. Even with the stress of a time-limit, it’s hardly high-octane action.

Without any depth to the combat, the game becomes repetitive fairly quickly. With no variation between the matches, once you’ve won 4 or 5 in a row, there’s little incentive to keep playing, other than to test yourself against the punishingly hard CPU at later levels.

Other versions

An English translation, renamed Tag Team Wrestling was released in western arcades in January 1984.

In this version, Sunny and Terry have become Jocko and Spike while the heels are rebranded as the Mad Maulers. When translating the moves, they made some interesting choices (“Enzuigiri” becomes “Rabbit Killer”) and there are some things they didn’t bother translating at all – the message saying that the game was approved by New Japan and All Japan remains in Japanese.

Home console versions followed in 1985 and 1986, but the gameplay is different enough from the 1983 original (‘push-button’ grapples (rather than ‘collision grapples’) being the key addition) to warrant covering those versions separately.

Verdict

It’s well known that Technos / Data East brass wanted to cancel this game halfway through development. They were persuaded otherwise and they ended up with a reasonably-sized hit on their hands, with The Big Pro Wrestling topping Japanese arcade charts in early 1984.

It is easy to see why. This is a charming snapshot of late 1970s / early 1980s Japanese pro wrestling, packed full of character and nice touches. It’s a hugely creditable first attempt at the genre featuring intros, larger than life characters, all the top moves of the day, interference and more. However, the gameplay itself gets dull pretty quickly and it can’t really be said that The Big Pro Wrestling lays any gameplay foundations for future wrestling games … something that Technos Japan would rectify in their next attempt…

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“This was my very first memorable hit game. It’s a work I’m extremely fond of.

At the time, Technōs Japan (now famous for the Kunio-kun series) was a small, unknown company with only five or six staff members. We desperately wanted to make a hit game and make a name for ourselves. One day, a colleague and I got excited, saying, “Why don’t we try making something based on what we’re personally most interested in?” The thing that caught our attention was pro wrestling, which was booming in popularity thanks to Ichirō Furutachi’s live commentary. So we planned a game with a new system built around pro wrestling as its theme.

However, the company president was opposed to the idea. “New things carry big risks. The chance of failure is high,” he said.

In the end, halfway through development, an order came down to cancel the project. All of the staff were completely disheartened.

But then a senior member of the sales team stepped in and said, like something out of a TV drama: “If you guys are confident it’ll be fun, then see it through to the end. I’ll go and persuade the president for you.”

Thanks to that senior colleague’s efforts, development was restarted. When the game was finished, it turned out that we all really did love pro wrestling — and the game was a huge success in the location test.

Back then, all of us staff used to encourage each other by saying: “Someday, let’s line up lots of the games we’ve made in that big game centre in Kabukichō.”

That dream of everyone on the team eventually became a reality.”

– Takashi Yoneda, Technos Japan Planner for The Big Pro-Wrestling

Technical Deep Dive: How The Big Pro Wrestling Really Works

Below is a full breakdown of the game’s rules, taken directly from the program code. The arcade board runs on a 6502 processor, and every rule here was read from a disassembly of the game’s code first, then confirmed by running scripted matches in the MAME emulator. Where something is proven by the code alone, it’s flagged.

The Japanese original and the western Tag Team Wrestling share the same rules: every routine and table compared is identical, apart from addresses shifted by the English text.

Times are given in frames, which is how the game counts. The board runs at about 57 frames per second, so 57 frames is about one second. Button names follow the arcade’s own numbering, as above: Button 2 cycles the menu, Button 1 performs.

1. Power and speed

Each wrestler’s health is a Power value from 0 to 16, which is what the POWER bar shows. The game only ever shows your Power: the CPU’s is never displayed.

Who	Starts at
The first wrestler on each team in a match	16
Every later entry after a tag (either team)	14, 12, 10, then 8 for the rest of the match

There’s no separate Power for the wrestler waiting on the apron. Whoever comes in gets the next value in that list, whatever state they were in before. So tagging only helps if your Power is below that value. The heels follow exactly the same rules.

Power also sets your speed, and that speed “tier” drives several other rules further down:

Power	Speed tier	Walking speed
13-16	3	a step every frame
9-12	2	7 steps in every 9 frames (78%)
5-8	1	6 in 9 (67%)
0-4	0	5 in 9 (56%)

You and the CPU use the same movement tables, so at the same Power you move at the same speed. The tier is only recalculated between moves, never during one.

2. The arms

Every wrestler’s upper body flips between “arms down” and “arms up” on its own timer, whether or not they’re moving. The legs are animated separately.

• Your arms hold each pose for a random 17, 33, 41 or 49 frames, at every difficulty level.
• The CPU’s arms are not random in the ring. They follow fixed timings that get harsher as the game goes on.
• Your arms never matter. The game works out whether your arms are up every single frame, and then never looks at the result.

Difficulty level	CPU arms down	Bloody Mask arms up	Mad Bull Giant arms up	Bloody Mask’s arms up, % of the time
0 (match 1)	41 frames	57 frames	73 frames	58%
1	39	73	89	65%
2	37	89	105	71%
3	35	105	121	75%
4	33	121	153	79%
5	31	137	169	82%
6 (match 7 onwards)	29	153	185	84%
7 (Hard DIP switch)	27	169	201	86%

By match 7, the window in which you can win a lock-up is about half a second (29 frames), once every three seconds or so. Mad Bull Giant always keeps his arms up longer than Bloody Mask: 16 frames longer at first, then 32 frames longer from level 4, because his table skips a value.

3. The lock-up

A lock-up starts when the two wrestlers’ centres come within 16 pixels across and 17 pixels up or down. The game freezes both arm poses and checks only the CPU’s:

• CPU’s arms down: you get the move menu on the very next frame.
• CPU’s arms up: stalemate. If you don’t pull away, the CPU takes the hold after exactly 125 frames (2.2 seconds). If it’s enraged, it takes the hold instantly.

4. The move menu and damage

• The whole game freezes while the menu is up, including the match clock.
• You get 112 frames (just under 2 seconds). The countdown shows “3, 2, 1, 0”: 32 frames for each number, but only 16 for the “0”. The time limit is the same in every match, at every difficulty, and in both versions.
• Each step through the list needs a fresh press of Button 2. The list starts on Headlock and doesn’t wrap round.
• If the timer runs out, the CPU reverses you with its heavier move (see section 7).
• Damage is applied the instant you choose the move, before the animation even starts.

Presses	Move	Bloody Mask loses	Mad Bull Giant loses	You lose*
0	Headlock	2	2	2
1	Kick Combo	2	2	2
2	Western Jab	2	2	2
3	Chop Combo	2	2	3
4	Drop Kick	3	3	3
5	Body Slam	3	3	3
6	Enzuigiri	3	3	3
7	Piledriver	4	1 (reversed)	4
8	Western Lariat	5	1 (reversed)	4
9	Brainbuster	5	1 (reversed)	4
10	German Suplex	5	1 (reversed)	4
11	Cobra Twist	2	1 (reversed)	4

* Once your Power is 4 or less, your own moves cost you nothing.

Note that the damage doesn’t climb steadily down the list. The first four moves all do 2, and the last move, the Cobra Twist, does only 2 as well.

The Giant’s reversals aren’t random and don’t depend on how worn down he is. He has his own animation for every move, and his versions of the Piledriver through to the Cobra Twist put you on the mat. That happens every time, at any Power, in any match. You still pay the full cost, and he takes just 1. One quirk: the game’s automatic cover (see section 5) doesn’t check which heel it’s dealing with. So if a reversed Piledriver, Western Lariat or Brainbuster happens to take the Giant from 1 Power to 0, your wrestler gets up, covers him and wins anyway.

5. Pinfalls

The referee counts one every 64 frames, so a 3-count takes 160 frames (2.8 seconds). He never decides a kick-out himself. A pin only ends early if the animation being played switches the cover off, which means every pin’s outcome is decided the moment it starts.

Pressing Button 1 after a move. Once your move has put the opponent on the mat, pressing Button 1 drops the rest of the move and goes for a cover. The outcome depends only on the opponent’s Power before the move landed:

Opponent’s Power	Result
0-4	Unbreakable 3-count: you win
5-12	He always kicks out at 2
13-16	He always kicks out at 1

You can only pin after a move that floors him:

Move	vs Bloody Mask	vs Mad Bull Giant
Drop Kick, Body Slam, Enzuigiri	Yes	Yes
Piledriver, Western Lariat, Brainbuster	Yes	No (reversed)
Headlock, Kick, Western Jab, Chop, German Suplex, Cobra Twist	No	No

A failed pin costs you nothing except 2-4 seconds of match time. The damage has already been dealt, and when the kick-out happens both wrestlers end up exactly where, and on exactly the Power, they would have been without it. So it’s always worth pressing Button 1 after a move that floors him.

One caution: any move that pushes the opponent past the edge of the ring sends him outside, and that ends the move before the point where you could pin. The Drop Kick throws him furthest, so near the ropes it’s the move most likely to spoil a pin.

The automatic cover. If the opponent’s Power reaches 0, your wrestler covers him automatically once the move ends, and that count can’t be broken. This doesn’t happen after the German Suplex or Cobra Twist, which have their own finishes:

• Cobra Twist on Bloody Mask at Power 4 or less: a submission win, 289 frames (about 5 seconds) after the hold starts. At Power 5 or more, Mad Bull Giant always runs in and breaks it up, but the 2 damage still counts.
• German Suplex on Bloody Mask at Power 4 or less: it becomes a bridging pin that can’t be kicked out of.

6. The fastest possible wins

Taking the damage table and the pin rules together, here are the fewest moves needed to win, assuming you win every lock-up you need. The final move counts as one of the moves: the pin happens during it.

Bloody Mask: 4 moves. His biggest moves do 5, so three moves can’t take him from 16 to 0, and two can’t get him to 4 or less.

Move	Bloody Mask’s Power	Your Power
Start	16	16
1. Western Lariat	11	12
2. Western Lariat	6	8
3. Body Slam	3	5
4. Body Slam + Button 1	Win	(free)

Using a Body Slam on move 3 rather than a third Lariat keeps your own Power at 5. That matters, because losing a lock-up at Power 4 or less loses you the match (section 7).

Mad Bull Giant: 5 moves. Against him, nothing does more than 3.

Move	Giant’s Power	Your Power
Start	16	16
1-4. Body Slam / Enzuigiri / Drop Kick	13, 10, 7, 4	13, 10, 7, 4
5. Body Slam + Button 1	Win

Every move against the Giant costs you as much as it costs him, so you always reach the final lock-up on Power 4, and that lock-up decides the match for both of you. A heel who comes in on a tag starts lower, so a fresh Bloody Mask on 14 takes only 3 moves: two Lariats, then a pinning move.

7. The CPU’s moves

The game never names the CPU’s moves anywhere in the code; they’re just numbered entries in each heel’s move table. When the CPU wins a lock-up, it chooses a move from your Power. If it’s enraged, or if you let the menu time out, it uses the heavier move of the pair instead. Every CPU move also costs the CPU 1 Power.

Your Power	Bloody Mask	Mad Bull Giant	You lose	How it ends
13-16	Headlock, then a punch	Headlock	4	–
9-12	Punch combo	Punch	4	Throws you
5-8	Irish whip into an Enzuigiri, then a pin	Body Slam, then a pin	4	Near-fall: the count reaches 2 and you always kick out
0-4	Irish whip into a Cross Body, then a pin	Neck Hanging Tree	3	You lose (pinfall / submission)
13-16, enraged	Headlock into a Body Slam	Headlock	5	Throws you
9-12, enraged	Irish whip into an Enzuigiri	Headlock, ending in a throw	5	Both go down / throws you
5-8, enraged	Irish whip into a punch	Headlock, slam, then a pin	5	Giant: near-fall, count of 2
0-4, enraged	Irish whip into an Enzuigiri, then a pin	Irish whip into a Neck Hanging Tree, then a pin	2	You lose (pinfall)

So losing any lock-up while your Power is 4 or less loses the match. As with your own pins, the near-falls are fixed: there’s no button you can press to kick out, because the animation itself decides when the cover is released.

8. Rage

If nobody performs a move for long enough, the CPU flies into a rage:

Difficulty level	Time before rage
0 (match 1)	256 frames (4.5 s)
1	187 frames (3.3 s)
2	168 frames (2.9 s)
3	143 frames (2.5 s)
4	123 frames (2.2 s)
5	106 frames (1.9 s)
6 (match 7 onwards)	81 frames (1.4 s)
7 (Hard DIP switch)	62 frames (1.1 s)

• The timer only counts while the wrestlers are apart, and only while the CPU has 6 or more Power. A stalemate pauses it; only a performed move resets it.
• At 128 frames the referee raises both arms as a warning, but only in matches 1-4. From match 5 onwards the rage arrives sooner than that, and the warning never appears.
• Enraged, the CPU turns red with its arms fixed up and heads straight for you, re-aiming every frame. It gets no extra speed: it’s only faster than you if your own Power has slowed you down. It takes the hold the instant it touches you and uses its heavier move.
• The rage never wears off by itself. Only a performed move or a CPU tag ends it.

9. How the CPU moves around the ring

The CPU’s movement looks random, but it follows a simple cycle:

1. On entering the ring, it walks diagonally down-left, towards your side, for 57 frames. That’s why it never walks away from you at the start of a match.
2. Then it alternates: it stands still for 57 frames, then moves for 57 frames, and repeats.
3. At the start of each move phase, it picks one direction and keeps it for the whole phase. It doesn’t look at where you are.

Direction	Chance
Up-left	50%
Each of the other seven directions	6.25%
Stand still	6.25%

The sprint. Each move phase also has a 50% chance of being a sprint. It only works once the CPU’s Power is 12 or less:

	Pixels per step	Top speed
You, and the CPU walking	1	1 pixel per frame
CPU sprinting, matches 1-7	2	up to 1.56 pixels per frame
CPU sprinting, match 8 onwards	3	up to 2.33 pixels per frame

So a weakened CPU can genuinely run faster than you can follow. The sprint isn’t aimed away from you; its direction is a separate random choice. But “away” is the most common result anyway: the up-left bias keeps dragging the CPU towards the top-left of the ring, so you’re usually below or to the right of it. Sprints towards you end almost at once in a lock-up, so the ones you notice are the ones running away.

Once its Power drops below 6, after it has had at least one lock-up, the CPU stops this cycle and heads for its corner to tag. If its last move phase was a sprint, it can run there at double or triple speed.

10. What difficulty changes

The difficulty level starts at 0 in the first match, goes up by 1 with each win until match 7 (level 6), and the Hard DIP switch adds 1 more. It changes:

• the CPU’s arm timings (section 2)
• how soon the CPU enrages (section 8)
• how likely Violence Ceasar Singh is to appear (section 11)

In addition, the CPU’s sprint becomes faster from match 8, based on the match number rather than the difficulty level. Difficulty does not change your arm timings, any damage, anyone’s Power, the menu time limit, or the speed of the pin and count-out counts.

The match number decides who starts in the ring: Bloody Mask in odd-numbered matches, Mad Bull Giant in even ones.

11. Outside the ring

• Landing outside halves your Power. Only yours: the CPU loses nothing when it lands.
• While you’re outside, your Power recovers by 1 on every third count, up to 4 times.
• You can only move left and right along the floor. Press Up to climb back in, anywhere except the far ends of the apron.
• Lock-ups have no stalemate. If the CPU’s arms are up, it takes the hold at once.
• The count-out is 20 counts, one every 46 frames: 920 frames, or 16 seconds.

The outside menu works quite differently from the one in the ring:

	In the ring	Outside
Moves	12	3
Choosing	one press of Button 2 per move	a press count: 0-4 presses for the Knuckle Arrow, the 5th press for the Brain Chop, the 9th for the ring post attack
Time limit	112 frames, game frozen	128 frames (2.25 s), and the game keeps running, so the count-out continues
If time runs out	the CPU’s heavier move	the CPU’s outside attack: you lose 4
Damage you deal	see section 4	none at all

The outside moves do no damage because of a programming bug. The code that looks up their damage loops through a three-entry table. But its exit test checks the wrong result, so the loop runs until its counter wraps round to zero, and the damage always comes out as 0. The intended values were 1, 2 and 3. The bug is the same in the western version.

Violence Ceasar Singh. The first time your wrestler is knocked down on each trip outside, the game rolls once to decide whether Singh appears:

Difficulty level	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Chance Singh appears	6%	12.5%	19%	25%	31%	34%	37.5%	41%

If he comes, he storms through the crowd and attacks you with his sword, which halves your Power. Get back into the ring before he reaches you and he leaves without attacking. There’s only one roll per trip outside.

Coming back in. The ring screen only returns once both wrestlers have climbed in. It then puts you on one of two fixed spots, chosen by which half of the ring the ring-out happened in. Where you climbed back in makes no difference.

Ring-out happened on the	You (front of the ring)	CPU (back of the ring)
Left half	left side	16 pixels to your right
Right half	right side	16 pixels to your left

If the CPU comes back in on 0 Power, the game quietly gives it 1, so it can’t be covered automatically the moment you’re back in the ring.

12. How matches end

Result	How
Win by pinfall	Button 1 after a flooring move, with the opponent on Power 0-4; or the automatic cover when his Power reaches 0; or a German Suplex on Bloody Mask at Power 4 or less
Win by submission	Cobra Twist on Bloody Mask at Power 4 or less
Win by count-out	The CPU is still outside at 20 while you’re back in
Loss by pinfall / submission	Losing a lock-up while your Power is 4 or less
Loss by count-out	You’re still outside at 20
Loss by double count-out	Both of you are outside at 20
Loss by time limit	The match clock runs out

The match clock runs at 62 frames per “second”. At 4:00 a warning flashes, followed by a 60-second countdown. In all, that’s about five and a half real minutes. Only an outright win takes you to the next match.

13. How long can you keep going?

There is no final match. After every win, the game simply adds one to the match number and carries on. The trophies and belts on the results screen stop changing at 10 wins:

Wins	Awards shown
1-4	1-4 trophies (two silver, then two gold)
5-7	4 trophies plus 1-3 silver belts
8-9	4 trophies, 3 silver belts and 1-2 gold belts
10 or more	“WORLD CHAMP” and a single gold belt, the same from then on

The awards after 1, 2, 3 … 10 wins (top to bottom), and after 25 wins (bottom row).

The win counter is a single byte, so it rolls over after 256 matches. Match 257 would be played at match 1’s difficulty, and the “GAME” number on screen rolls over from 99 to 00. (These two details are read from the code; I didn’t test them in the emulator.)

The score is six digits, and the game never checks for it going over the top. Past 999,999, it rolls back round through zero. The CHAMP high score is only ever replaced by a higher one, so it keeps your best score from before the rollover.

Top: 99,900 plus one win becomes 121,900. Bottom: 999,900 plus one win becomes 021,900. (The high score shows 50,000 here only because the score was set directly for the test.)

14. What’s random, and what isn’t

The game’s random number generator is used for only a handful of things:

• how long your arms hold each pose
• the CPU’s direction and sprint chance for each move phase
• whether a CPU wrestler who has just tagged in does the down-left entry walk (50%)
• the CPU’s arm timings, but only in the attract-mode demo and outside the ring
• the referee’s wandering
• some of Bloody Mask’s decisions outside the ring
• Singh’s appearance

Nothing about damage, lock-ups, menus, rage timing or pins is random. Every game also starts from the same random “seed”, so identical inputs on identical frames produce an identical match, every time.

15. Curiosities in the code

• An unused, older rage. The program contains a different version of the rage code that is never called. Unlike the finished game’s rage, it switched the CPU’s “instant hold” state on during a window and then off again. It also depends on a counter that nothing in the finished game ever sets, so it would do nothing even if it were called.
• The outside-move damage bug (section 11).
• The player’s arm check is worked out every frame and never used (section 2).
• The Giant’s arm table skips a value at level 4, so from that point his lead over Bloody Mask’s arms-up time doubles from 16 frames to 32 (section 2).

Bonus: seeing the CPU’s health

Because the game never shows the CPU’s Power, I asked AI to patch a copy of the ROM to display both wrestlers’ Power as numbers, in the empty row under “CHAMP”.

The modded panel: the title screen, then the start of a match, the move menu, and mid-match on 8 and 12. The numbers update the moment damage is dealt, while the original bar waits until the move has finished.