Pro Wrestler o Tsukurou! THE GOLDEN HOUR

~ the obit ~

THE GOLDEN HOUR is a television slot. In Japan the phrase attaches to the Friday eight o'clock hour, the years when pro wrestling was network programming rather than a niche, and Sammy Networks hung it on the end of a phone game in December 2014. The game itself was プロレスラーをつくろう, Let's Make a Pro Wrestler, shortened by everyone to レスつく. It belonged to a long line of つくろう titles from Takayuki Kawagoe, who built Saka-Tsuku for soccer and who had tried to get a wrestling version made at Sega years earlier without managing it.

You raised one wrestler. The executive producer had to say that on the record, because the title made people assume it was a promotion-management game, and the single-wrestler frame is what let the headline feature work: you scouted new wrestlers by pointing the phone camera at real-world barcodes. A can of coffee or the back of a magazine would return somebody to fight or recruit.

That mechanic needed a Japanese shelf within walking distance, which is a fair description of the whole product. Wrestling did reach Turkey, and it reached it as WWF on cable in the nineties with American names on the card. Nothing about puroresu or its tag-team history came with it, so a game built to monetize affection for Jumbo Tsuruta had nowhere outside the country to find an audience.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ scanning for wrestlers ~

The barcode camera carried the whole acquisition loop rather than sitting in a menu as a novelty. Scanning something generated a wrestler, which meant the game's content pipeline ran through whatever happened to be in your bag or on the shelf in front of you. It also meant a free phone game in 2014 was asking for camera permission from an audience that had mostly never pointed a handset at a barcode for any reason at all.

By the eighth week it had been downloaded three hundred thousand times. That is the only usage number anybody put in print.

~ the tag teams ~

Before launch the executive producer said the team had deliberately not planned a roster of licensed real wrestlers. Then they licensed them, one tag team at a time. Stan Hansen with Bruiser Brody, the Funk brothers, Abdullah the Butcher with The Sheik, Riki Choshu with Tatsumi Fujinami, Jumbo Tsuruta with Genichiro Tenryu. Choshu and Fujinami ran as a timed event from 28 April to 8 May 2015. Characters from THE MOMOTAROH, a wrestling manga from the late eighties, had been announced as guests before the game even shipped.

Pairing them as teams was the sharp decision. A Japanese wrestling fan over forty does not hold Hansen in memory alone, they hold Hansen and Brody walking to the ring together, and the game sold the pair rather than the man.

~ ten months and three weeks ~

Gold Ticket sales stopped on 31 August 2015. Sammy Networks posted the closure notice on 2 September at 21:18 and set the end for 3 November, with no time of day given and no reason past 諸般の事情により, a formula that means circumstances and commits to nothing. The 4Gamer database lists a 10 December 2014 release, one day before the Android store build went live, which is the usual gap between a submission date and a launch date.

Kawagoe had wanted a wrestling つくろう since the Sega years and got not quite eleven months of it.

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