WWE All Stars

~ the eulogy ~

The confirmation came off a personal Twitter account. Aubrey Sitterson, at the time the interactive marketing manager for WWE Games, told people that the online multiplayer servers for WWE All Stars had been switched off as of 28 April 2013. There was no notice page and no window, because the company that would have written one had been sold at auction three months earlier.

THQ published the game on 29 March 2011 in North America and 1 April in Europe, on PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii and Xbox 360, with a Nintendo 3DS version arriving that November. It is the only WWE game ever released for the 3DS and the last one released for either the PS2 or the PSP, which makes it a marker for two hardware generations closing at the same time.

I was on a PC in Ankara when this came out, past the age where a new wrestling game counted as news, and console fighting games were never my lane anyway. What holds up from outside is the design problem it set itself, which was to make two decades of American television argue with each other.

~ the dossier ~

~ fantasy warfare ~

The game was arcade, not simulation. THQ's other wrestling line, SmackDown vs. Raw, spent its budget trying to look like a broadcast. All Stars made the wrestlers enormous and let them jump twenty feet, so John Cena's Attitude Adjustment became an aerial throw and Triple H's Pedigree put a shock wave across the canvas. Combos mattered more than holds and half of them happened in midair.

The mode it was built around was Fantasy Warfare, fifteen matches pairing a legend against the modern wrestler who most resembled him, each one opened by a video promo that made the case for the comparison. Clearing them unlocked ten of the thirty-man roster, and the final bout was Shawn Michaels against The Undertaker, billed as Mr. WrestleMania. Every matchup in it assumes you know both names well enough to already have an opinion.

~ the publisher went first ~

THQ filed for Chapter 11 on 19 December 2012 and its catalog was auctioned on 23 January 2013. The WWE license did not travel with the catalog. Take-Two picked up the wrestling rights and the annual series continued as 2K's, which left every THQ-era WWE title as a game that nobody now held the right to sell. The digital listings came down.

What survived was a disc. The single-player ladder still runs off it, Path of Champions and Fantasy Warfare included, and the servers kept running for three more months on somebody's expiring contract. The only thing that ended in April was two people in different houses playing each other.

~ 28 april 2013 ~

Two years and one month is a short online life even for a licensed game. What killed it was a bankruptcy auction in a different state, which is how most of these end once the publisher stops existing, and the reason anyone knows the date at all is that a marketing employee answered a question on Twitter.

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