Remember WWF Superstars? I do

So here I am. I’m around 10 or 11. I’m kinda shy. I have glasses. Slightly overweight but still acceptable. The bar down the street has videogames. It’s the cool thing in 1991. Super Mario, Street Fighter II and all the rest. Gets kids going and spending money, ya know? I’m also a big fan of this stuff I just discovered on TV with my grandpa. Wrestling. It’s so weird. Big men who look like superheroes pretending to fight. I mean. It’s obvious. No one could stand being punched 300 times in 5min without a scratch.

And it’s the greatest thing in the world.

And now I’m still inside that bar and the arcade is going strong. Buncha kids playing Street Fighter II and I’m kinda lost. And here It is:

WWF Superstars.

Oh man, oh man, oh man. It’s the Macho Man! And it’s Hulk Hogan! And it’s the Honky Tonk… well, nobody cares about him but you get it. One coin away. So many buttons and no idea on which ones to push (and God knows videogame companies knew that and how much they would make out of it, ya know).

Then one kid I didn’t know came by. “Wanna play?”. “Yeah!”. We kids spent at least 2h playing with a pocket full of coins and letting other kids join us. By the end of the day no one got to meet Andre and the Million Dollar Man in the finals.

What all of us got was we met new friends. Kids from around all the neighborhood. Rich kids. Poor kids. Kids with parents in prison and kids whose parents were doctors. All of us and all of our eyes stuck on this goddamn videogame and cheering each other to get to the final stage.

I’m 46. Time is a sword. Most of them friends I lost contact with. Some moved. Some graduated and went onto big things. Some didn’t. Some saw their dreams fulfill. Some didn’t have dreams to begin with. Some died…

And we’re all still in that bar. Playing WWF Superstars. Cheering each other. Life is beautiful. I just met this girl I like and maybe I’ll marry her one day. Edoardo is good at math. Giovanni is always sore because his dad is a drunk but he’s one of the boys and we care for him. Letizia is cool. She’s a girl but she’s more like a boy to us and that’s cool too. We don’t mind. Andrea got sick one day. Parents took him to he doctor and they told him he was sick. We started going to his place because he couldn’t move around that easy anymore.

Then, one day, we just stopped going to his place because his parents told us he wasn’t well enough to even meet us.

And then he was gone.

Now this was just a little column of mine to talk about wrestling games. The greatest wrestling game of all time. Or maybe it was just a way for me to reminish and remember when things were good. Can’t we all every now and then?

WWF Superstars. It truly was a rush.

Please leave comments about your games and, furthermore, your memories about those games and what they meant to you.

This is MRC,
Thanks for reading