LogInThe game is celebrating its 30th birthday next month.
Ahead of WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game celebrating its 30th birthday next month – feeling old yet? – a rare behind-the-scenes clip of the game's development has resurfaced and gone viral on Twitter, delighting fans of wrestling and retro games alike.
As many of you undoubtedly know, the old-school approach to creating fighting game characters involved recording real-life actors' movements and converting them into in-game sprites – a technique known as digitalization and used in games like Fists of Fire with Jackie Chan, 1994 Street Fighter: The Movie, and, of course, the original Mortal Kombat.
As shown in the video, Midway used the same technique in 1995, with legendary wrestlers Razor Ramon, Shawn Michaels, and The Undertaker posing, punching, and falling in order for their movements to be captured. While the footage is impressive on its own, the clip is but a small snippet of the under-the-hood material for WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game we've got, with YouTube channel InsertCoin having uploaded over three hours of footage back in 2024:
Also featuring Yokozuna, not present in the minute-long clip from Twitter:
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