Trivia / WWE Video Games

• Actor Allusion: 24/7 Mode in SmackDown vs. Raw 2008 had Roddy Piper talk about kicking ass and chewing bubble gum.
• Dummied Out:
  • Jeff Jarrett & Goldust were originally going to be included in the first game, but their departures to WCW saw them removed before release. Their bodies were later included in the Create-A-Wrestler mode in 'SmackDown 2: Know Your Role'', including their heads. However, the WWE was seemingly upset enough for the former's name to be censored out of footage for the Survivor Series Deadly Game tournament in '13.
  • Ken Shamrock & Big Show in SmackDown 2: Know Your Role. However, this doesn't stop them from occasionally turning up in the Royal Rumble, complete with their entrance themes, if an "unlock all" cheat device code is used.
  • Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, and Jeff Hardy in SmackDown: Here Comes The Pain. Hogan was removed due to his own WWE departure under bad terms earlier in the year, while Jeff was removed after being fired from the company due to his personal demons.
  • Stone Cold and Brock Lesnar were planned to be playable in 2004's WWE Day of Reckoning before being removed due to both leaving the company. Files for entrances, stats and movesets still exist in the game. As well as this, their character slots still exist and can be hacked to be playable, albeit using different models.
  • In a rather surprising addition, a fully complete model (sans crowd signs) of Bill Goldberg can be found in WWE Wrestlemania 21 for the Xbox. The game was released in 2005, with Goldberg having been gone for over a year at that point. He is fully playable, with a mod able to bring him back into the game. In a rather creative asset reuse, his model was turned green and used as a training dummy in edit a moveset.
  • Sergeant Slaughter, Eddie Guerrero and Jim Neidhart were originally intended to be in the PlayStation 2 & PSP versions of SmackDown Vs. Raw 2008, but the decision was made to make them exclusive to PSP & their models were removed from the PS2 release; their unique entrances & moves are available in all versions of the game.
    • Chris Benoit, due to his tragic end, was completely removed from the game with only his entrance left in the game. By using a cheat device, one can find an empty character slot with his attributes & complete move list, along with Benoit's signature moves which otherwise remain inaccessible in the game.
  • Paige was in 2k15 as a "Season Pass exclusive", but because the DLC came free as a patch on the PC port, there was no Season Pass. So by 2K's infinite wisdom that meant Paige wasn't accessible, despite all her data actually being in the files.
  • It appears that Hogan has been dummied out again in 2K16 because his racist scandal lead to him being fired and unpersoned from WWE the day after his inclusion in the game was leaked online. ^note Even though 2K confirmed that the leak was false and never confirmed Hogan for the game, it's far from unreasonable to assume that Hogan would have been included had this not happened, since all of the other DLC characters from 15 were included in 16. Hogan would later return in 2K20 after the hatchet was buried at 2018 Extreme Rules pay-per-view.
  • Enzo Amore and Big Cass in 2K19, after the duo were released from the company during the game's development for each other's separate behavioral issues.
  • Adam Cole and Bray Wyatt in 2K22 after the former’s signing with AEW and the latter’s protection of his copyright on various aspects of the Fiend persona. Both have updated entrances (with Bray having two different ones based on both his Funhouse Friend and Fiend characters) as well as extensive files that indicate that they would have played significant roles in MyRise, including a new arena and match type specifically designed for Bray. Bronson Reed’s model can still be found in the game as well, along with specific commentary attached to his signature and finisher when hacked back into the game.
    • Prior to the Stand Back DLC pack’s release, dataminers were able to identify that the character slot for Zachary Wentz, formerly known as Nash Carter, had been removed from 2K22. This meant that the character was completely gone, to the point that even generating the default MSK tag team in the menu created it with just Wes Lee and no one else.
    • NXT’s Boa was confirmed to have a slot in the game by dataminers, but only for a manager capacity. Said slot was switched out for the second Doink interference spot during production, likely due to Xia Li’s callup from NXT and the end of their group together. Despite this, Boa was still offered as a MyFaction manager card.
  • Mandy Rose in 2K23 following her release from the company. While she was the leader of Toxic Attraction, she has an updated entrance for herself, along with the stable's trio entrance motion with stablemates Gigi Dolin and Jacy Jayne.
  • Vince McMahon and Brock Lesnar in 2K24, after they were implicated in a far-reaching sex-trafficking scandal that saw them removed from TKO and WWE entirely just over a month before the release of the game. Whilst both were removed from the wider game, due to time constraints, they remain present in the Showcase mode - Brock is playable in three showcase matches (two historical and one bonus match at the end) but unable to be unlocked for other modes, whilst Vince is present in the Austin/Rock match, but is unable to be played in any capacity.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: On July 26, 2022, it was discovered that all Games that were on Steam had been delisted, with only the 2 most recent titles (2k22 and Battlegrounds) remaining - if you had downloaded them beforehand, or you had a physical copy of one for either the Xbox One or Playstation 4, you could still play it, but you wouldn't be able to buy any DLC and could only download DLC you already had. While 2k20 was likely removed due to how infamously broken the game was, it's possible that the other games were removed due to the developer, Yukes, becoming the developer of the first AEW game.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: WWF SmackDown! 2: Know Your Role was this to the first WWF SmackDown!, released late in the same year as the original, and quickly bringing that to obscurity at the time. The original game was impressive, yet rushed. With a handful of exceptions, every character, ring and mode returned in the sequel, with several more of each added, and the gameplay is identical. The create mode was vastly improved too, although all the parts from the original remain under 'Standard'. The main draw to playing the original is the presence of Ken Shamrock, who never appeared in another SmackDown game. The Big Show is also present though omitted from the sequel (though he was, however, in all other games in the series save for SvR 2008). Backstage arenas are slightly different (although the Kitchen and Boiler Room were reused in Know Your Role).
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • Undertaker Feud - Whoever feuds with the Undertaker in the career mode has had something bad happen to them in the next year. At the extreme end is the aforementioned Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit tragedies; after that, the Phenom seemed content with getting people injured, suspended or fired.
    Oddly enough 2K14 features an entire game mode based around ending Undertaker's WrestleMania winning streak. At 2014's WrestleMania XXX, Taker's streak was finally broken. Foreshadowing by the WWE and Devs? Additionally, Taker himself suffered a bad concussion during the match and was shipped to the hospital afterward.
  • Cover Star - Someone on the cover of the game getting injured for a period of time in the year following the release, which occurred from 2005 to 2008 & again in 2010, 2013 to 2015. Notably, SvR 2008 had Bobby Lashley, John Cena & the Undertaker on the cover & all three of them suffered notable injuries in the following year, whilst the first SvR featured Mr. McMahon, who tore both quadriceps muscles sliding into the ring at the 2005 Royal Rumble, proving that even authority figures aren't safe from the curse.
    In a variation of this, Randy Orton was the cover star to WWE '12 - Whilst he didn't suffer an injury in 2012, Orton received a 60-day suspension for a second Wellness Policy strike, showing the curse will settle for a suspension instead of an actual injury.
    Subverted for 2K20 cover stars Roman Reigns and Becky Lynch. Lynch was mostly unaffected, aside from having to give up her Women's title due to her pregnancy in 2020, and would regain it upon her return in 2021. Reigns, in addition to also having twins on the way around the same time, pulled out of his WrestleMania 36 title match at the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic, due to being immunocompromised from leukemia; and wouldn't appear on WWE programming for several months, until SummerSlam 2020, and would win the Universal Title at Payback a few days later.
• Series Hiatus: WWE 2K announced that they would not be releasing a simulation game in 2020, presumably due to both the poor reception of 2K20 and the COVID-19 Pandemic hampering development and potential sales. Instead, an arcade game titled 2K Battlegrounds took the main series' place for 2K's annual outing. They also decided to skip 2021 as well, with the series returning for 2K22 in early 2022.
• Viral Marketing: WWE '13 did this with "A Revolution Is Coming" viral videos popping up on WWE.com, with many people thinking it was going to be a new wrestler or event. As it turned out, it was the announcement of WWE '13 with the revolution part tying in with CM Punk as the game's cover star.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A leaked early prototype version of the first SmackDown! game reveals several CAW parts for Meat (Shawn Stasiak) that never made it to the final version. CAW parts for Darren Drozdov also exist within the prototype's data, but are inaccessible via normal play.
  • 2K Games asked if they could include Cody Rhodes in 2K16 alongside his Stardust persona, but WWE refused.
  • 2K also "push[ed] as hard as [they] could" to include Sasha Banks, Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch, and Bayley (the very popular "Four Horsewomen" of NXT), but were unable to for "various reasons".
  • Roman Reigns was supposed to be the cover star of 2K16, but due to a combination of both his increasingly negative reception by the fanbase and the belief that "Stone Cold" Steve Austin was more marketable (and the Showcase star), he became the cover star instead. Reigns finally became a cover star in 2K20 alongside Becky Lynch.
  • Going by the entrance listed as "Darren Young and Manager", Bob Backlund was supposed to be in 2K18 at some point.
  • 2K suggested that a Brock Lesnar showcase was planned for 2K17, but due to a combination of some of Lesnar's biggest opponents from the past being unavailable (Hulk Hogan, who was blacklisted for his racial tirade against his daughter’s boyfriend and Kurt Angle who was in TNA at the time) and the unpopularity of the mode among the Vocal Minority, it was canned. Until 2K19 at least.
  • Big Cass was almost in 2K19, even having a model, however due to Cass being released only a few months before the game came out, he was scrapped.
  • Although Yukes did leave the role of developer for the series after 2K19, there's evidence that, during the time THQ was the publisher, there were efforts to find a different developer, as seen with WWE All-Stars and a few other cancelled games (WWE Brawl). Presumably, if All-Stars had been more successful, THQ San Diego would've taken over from Yukes.
  • As mentioned under Series Hiatus above, 2K21.
  • Maven, Luther Reigns and Mr America were revealed to have been planned for Smackdown vs Raw 2006, but were removed from the final version.
    • Maven and Luther Reigns were also seemingly planned for WWE Day of Reckoning 2, released in the same year. They were removed likely due to their releases from the company.
  • In the late 2000s, an online-centered game called Smackdown vs. Raw Online was set to be released for the PC. Sadly, it was cancelled for unknown reasons in 2011.
  • WWE 2K22 was originally expected to release in its usual time slot of fall but was delayed to March of 2022. While the on disk content is largely representative of this, various stars released during development have gone on record to state that they were in discussion for being included as DLC. This list including Chelsea Green, Hit Row’s Top Dolla, and former North American Champion Bronson Reed, who stated that he was scanned multiple times in preparation for an appearance. As the current 5 upcoming DLC packs feature current talent (as well as celebrity guests), it’s expected that the delay was used to focus on overwriting any work that had already been done on that front.
    • MSK was announced for the Stand Back DLC pack releasing in early June, but Nash Carter’s status was in question due to his release from the company a few months prior. It has since been reported that he will not be featured in the game, corroborated by dataminers that found out his character slot was removed and 2K themselves quietly replacing his name with that of two bonus MyFaction cards in the list of DLC plans for the game.
    • Ronda Rousey and Zelina Vega were reported to be in development for the game prior to the former’s contract expiring and the latter’s release. Following Ronda’s return at the Royal Rumble a few months before release, WWE made a special request for her to be added back to the game’s roster, which would be fulfilled as a part of the Clowning Around Pack released in late June. Vega was not so lucky, having missed the release entirely despite returning long before Ronda, though there appeared to be evidence that she was intended to be included at one point in the initial Whole Dam Pack DLC notes, which mentioned her by name instead of Sarray.
    • While there are several alternate character models in MyRise, a few were not made available to players like the rest with patch 1.12 due to them having since left the company (Johnny Gargano, Road Dogg) or their contract status being in question prior to the game’s release (Mustafa Ali).
  • Brock Lesnar was one of several wrestlers who would be highlighted in the Showcase Of The Immortals mode in 2K24 and was even one of the cover stars for the 40 Years edition... until he was removed from all WWE content. He was removed from advertising for the game and replaced on the cover by Triple H with very little explanation other than the obvious, though various journalists were able to identify from 2K that Brock's files would be hidden from all modes other than the ones that absolutely require him, such as Showcase and My Rise. Even so, he is unable to be unlocked for play in other modes by standard means.