Professional wrestling legend and WWE Hall of Fame Stone Cold Steve Austin who is also a former six times WWE World champion recently talked about the impact of video games and how it made him still recognizable to the current generation of wrestling fans.
Professional wrestling video games are extremely popular among the gamers and even the non wrestling fans who loves to play wrestling video games get familiar with the wrestlers through these video games. Similarly, current generation wrestling fans also get familiar with the Legends of the early days through these video games.
Steve Austin Explains Why He Is Still Recognizable To Fans
After WWE leaped to 3D graphics, they started to produce more wrestlers in their video game rosters. Their first video game WWF War Zone featured over 20 playable characters which was the big improvement from their 2D counterparts which usually featured 8 to 10 wrestlers at maximum.
Nowadays WWE video games feature more than 200 wrestlers in one single video game which helped players to simulate the experience of playing as a legend like Hulk Hogan or Stone Cold Steve Austin. This is an easy way for The gamers to recognise the legends who are almost forgotten in today’s wrestling world.
Stone Cold Steve Austin who is also a former six times WWE World champion recently spoke to Ryan Satin on his Out of Character podcast where he talked about the impact of video games and how it made him still recognisable towards the current generation of wrestling fans. He said;
“It was War Zone, the one with my arms up in the air [on the cover]. When you are a punk ass kid growing up in South Texas, you never expect you’re going to be on the cover of a video game and you know, A&E did a Biography on me.
“I told them, I said, ‘Dude, at the end of the day, I’m just a dude from Edna. I’m still that guy.’ so yeah, to see myself on the cover of a video game and to be on a couple of the 2K Games, that’s a blast. I never envisioned it in a million years. Does it mean something to me? Absolutely.
“Well, all these years later, when I retired in ’03, the video games and the WWE Network, I’m still as — people recognize me as much now than they used to when I was on fire, due to the video games and do to all that stuff. So it’s really helped me a lot.”
H/T and transcribed by Fightful