WWE Immortals

~ the obit ~

WWE Immortals arrived on 15 January 2015 for iOS and Android, free, from NetherRealm Studios working with Phosphor Game Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. NetherRealm is the Mortal Kombat studio, and the year before this they had shipped a mobile version of Injustice: Gods Among Us that turned DC superheroes into a collectible three-on-three card fighter. Immortals is that game with wrestlers in it.

The thing that made it worth remembering is what the art department did with the brief. Every WWE Superstar was reimagined as something out of a fantasy pantheon, a demon or an armored warlord with a health bar. Wrestling has always dressed itself in that language anyway, so the leap was shorter than it sounds, and the result was a roster of extremely famous faces rendered as characters they had never played.

Underneath the costumes it was a card game. Superstars were sorted into rarity tiers from bronze up to gold, you fought to earn Immortal Credits, and characters climbed to level 50 with duplicates pushing them to Legendary status so a weaker tier could be dragged up to compete with a stronger one. Platinum characters and a Zombie Invasion mode arrived later. Metacritic put the iOS version at 72.

The official Twitter account announced the end in early December 2018. In-app purchases stopped on 31 December 2018 and the app was pulled from both stores that week. Online play and cloud saves ran until 28 February 2019.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the engine underneath ~

Injustice mobile was the template for a whole generation of licensed fighters: collect the roster and tap to combo, with the save file kept on someone else's server. Warner Bros. had the engine and the studio, WWE had the faces. It is the cheapest kind of second product a publisher can build, and it worked well enough for four years.

What it could not do was outlive the deal. The license and the servers both belonged to a publisher with newer games to fund, and the support decision came down as a line item on somebody's budget.

~ from where I was standing ~

Wrestling was not something that ran through my part of the internet. I was on Turkish dial-up from 1998 and in internet cafes in the 2002 to 2005 stretch, where the screens were Counter-Strike and MSN, and the WWE fandom that would have made this game land never showed up in that room. By 2015 I was a working engineer in Ankara and the mobile card-fighter genre was something I read about rather than played.

~ what is left of it ~

When the servers went on 28 February 2019, the game did not disappear the way Disney Mirrorverse did five years later. Cloud saves broke and everything online stopped, but the single-player campaign kept running on the device, which means a copy installed before that date is still a working piece of software today.

The Android package is on the Internet Archive. There is a Change.org petition asking NetherRealm to bring it back, which has the tone that all such petitions have. Neither of those things constitutes a living game, but they are the reason this one is easier to see than most of its neighbors.

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