SCORPION: Mike Haggar. I'm going to make this simple for you. I have a plan. I'm here to destroy you, and I've planned that destruction down to every last detail. Everybody has something inside them that can be manipulated. Even you, mighty mayor. I will take everything that's dear to you. I will humble you in front of the entire world. And then, as you're crippled on the mat, at your lowest point ever, I will rip out the darkest parts of your soul for everybody to see. I don't plan on being here long, Mike. My plan is just that good. So come back soon, Mike Haggar. Fight me, like you always have. Return and let the very divinity of Hell itself destroy you. There's only one way this will play out, Mike. My way. Whether you like it or not.
- SMWA Monday Night Massacre, 2/15/1999

The year was 1998. On the backs of Stone Cold Steve Austin and the nWo, professional wrestling was skyrocketing to a level of popularity even higher than the Hulkamania era. The WWF and WCW clashed for TV supremacy every week in the height of the Monday Night Wars, and ECW rose to national prominence with its new pay-per-views.

This surge in popularity naturally led to a new generation of kids scouring the internet for a place to argue about their new passion. They found a community waiting for them at rec.sport.pro-wrestling, and a number of dirt-sheet and commentary websites to fuel their passion. Such was the birth of the internet wrestling community of today.

And as with every community, it was filled with people who thought they could do it better.

Fantasy booking ran rampant. Even more prevalent were e-federations, were people would sign up as real or original characters, and win or lose matches based on the strength of their “roleplays”- written clips, speeches and promos. The stronger your creativity and writing skills, the better your wrestlers performed in general. I myself founded or participated in a dozen of these leagues during the late 90's. But, this isn't about that.

There were people still who wanted to apply their vision of a better wrestling ring to the whole of a business, not just one wrestler. For these people, there was the TNM wrestling simulator.

The brainchild of German programmer Oliver Copp, TNM was in a class by itself for fantasy wrestling, in a day well before the elaborate create-a-wrestler-his-finisher-his-entrance-and-his-everything-else standard in today's wrestling games. This DOS-based, all-text sim was our own Micro League Baseball, with fully customizeable wrestlers, movesets, weapons, matches, managers- anything one could possibly need to bring his own sports opera to life. But this isn't quite about that, either.

In this fertile ground of squared-circle creativity, a Canadian named Kirk McCullough created something awesome.

While other TNM feds used real wrestlers, or a mix of those and some bland original creations, Kirk made something that stood tall above the rest- and he did it with something long-forgotten by wrestling fans and video gamers alike.

Enter the Slam Masters Wrestling Association.



Kirk adapted the ten characters from the obscure Capcom wrestling/fighting hybrid game Saturday Night Slam Masters- including Final Fight star Mike Haggar- surrounded them with a nuanced cast of original creations, and turned them loose on one another. Other Capcom characters came along for the ride as well- Final Fight's Cody and Zangief from Street Fighter were also SMWA mainstays.

He made some twists, of course- replacing fictional locales such as Metro City and- ugh- “Slam City”- with places like New York City and Portland, Oregon, and giving some of them less embarrassing names (“Titanic Tim”, for example, became “Titan” Tim Redbury)

The result was magic.
In a time where most armchair McMahons would simply be content to post card results and the occasional promo, Kirk used his TNM logs to build full, descriptive recaps of every event, every match, every promo. With this, he took the cardboard cutouts of the original Slam Masters, and made them three-dimensional characters, all with their own goals, influences, personalities, and epic battles.

Did you know Biff Slamkovich and Gunloc were once best friends, until the latter came under the influence of a furious xenophobe named Chad Hillsman?

Did you know that Oni lost a bitter feud, and became a being of light to get back at the Japanese mystics who had bested him?

Did you know Alexander “The Grater” has been kicked out of every stable he's ever been a part of?

Did you know The Scorpion held an entire wrestling organization hostage just to get his revenge on Mike Haggar?

These were but a few of the myriad storyline threads woven through McCullough's wrestling world by the time it folded in 1999.

It sounds like fanfiction- and generally, all fantasy booking is- but McCullough did something much greater than your average Cloud/Sephiroth slash fest. He took characters with no definition and defined them. He took a background, and made it a world. It was the cream of the crop in the old TNM community, and everyone knew it. I'm happy to have been a part of it.

The very-web 1.0-website is still up after all these years, check it out at http://olympia.fortunecity.com/dempsey/393/smwa.htm.

For more information on the TNM wrestling simulator, visit http://www.tnm7.com

(Author's note: I know, I know. Punctuality fail.)