It was more than 35 years ago, during the spring of 1987, when vignettes appeared on all Jim Crockett Promotions television shows, promising a new concept, “War Games,” that would debut on that year’s July 4 holiday show at the Omni in Atlanta.
This was before Crockett promotions got into the pay-per-view game later in the year. “War Games: The Match Beyond” was a creation of Dusty Rhodes, Crockett’s booker, with the name based on a popular 1983 movie called WarGames.
In those days, the biggest drawing gimmick match in pro wrestling was the cage match. And as most successful gimmicks, it would be done so often that it started losing its drawing power and specialness. So Rhodes added a number of different concepts to it and created a new annual major drawing match.
The original vignettes showed them building a giant steel cage. And then the match rules were later explained.
It would be two teams of five members. The match would be in a cage set up over two rings. The two-ring concept came from Houston, where promoter Paul Boesch every January had a two-ring Battle Royal. Verne Gagne had them as well, including one that aired on ABC’s Wide World of Sports in the 1970s.
The cage would have a top to it, with the idea that nobody could climb in and interfere and with the top, there was no way to escape. WWF cage matches were built around people climbing over the top to win, and the idea of the top was to tell fans there would be a decisive finish, not a cage climbing contest.
Two men would start and wrestle for five minutes. At that point, the remaining eight men would enter one at a time, in two-minute intervals. The staggered entrances were a part of the Rhodes concept that was used by WWF in Pat Patterson’s creation of the Royal Rumble at a house show later that year in St. Louis.
A coin flip would determine who had the man advantage. Because of the natural psychology of the match, it flowed much better when the heel team had the man advantage. That led to natural psychology of the heels’ constantly having a man advantage, and building to the fresh babyface entering to even the odds.
Of course, the coin flip became a joke over time since the heels virtually always won. J.J. Dillon, who managed the Horsemen team in the early years, became an all-time great in calling the coin flip, picking it correctly every time.
You were not allowed to win until all 10 were in the ring, so it was 21 minutes of brawling until “The Match Beyond” started. The match then could end only via submission or surrender. The idea is that you had a completely conclusive finish of somebody giving up, rather than just a pinfall, as you would see for a normal match.
The concept worked. The now legendary first event took place before a near sellout of 16,000 fans where Rhodes, Nikita Koloff, The Road Warriors and manager Paul Ellering beat The Four Horsemen (Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard and Lex Luger) and manager Dillon. It also had the first major casualty, as Dillon, a former wrestler who was basically retired from active competition, took The Road Warriors’ doomsday device finisher, and it destroyed his shoulder, leading to the “surrender” finish.
It was also one of the best matches held all year. In 1988, Crockett did a summer tour with War Games resulting in some of the biggest crowds and best matches the company had that year.
The Match Beyond term was eventually forgotten, but the rules stayed the same after Crockett promotions was rebranded as WCW. From 1992 to ’98, it was an annual pay-per-view event.
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After WCW went under, WWF/WWE sat on the trademark. The idea of doing a War Games was suggested many times, but Vince McMahon would never do it. McMahon was in a real-life war with Crockett and later WCW, and even though those days were over, he didn’t want to use a concept that the opposition invented.
But tons of other companies created similar concepts, taking the basics of the idea and making a few changes to call it their own. ECW held Ultimate Jeopardy. TNA had Lethal Lockdown. CZW did the Cage of Death. MLW used WarGames and even trademarked the rights to the name at one point when WWE never used it. ROH called it Steel Cage Warfare, and, most recently, AEW went back to the original Rhodes concept and called it Blood and Guts. (That name actually came from a WWE investor call where Vince McMahon made a snide remark about AEW’s product calling it “blood and guts,” and the promotion decided to use that line against him, naming its version of War Games after it.)
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When Paul “Triple H” Levesque was running the NXT promotion in WWE, he brought the concept to WWE for the first time in 2017, after the company purchased its rights back from MLW.
WarGames became an annual end-of-the-year event in NXT, and the concept led to some of the best matches in that brand’s history.
Still, McMahon wouldn’t okay it for the main roster. After McMahon’s resignation led to Levesque taking over creative a few months back, it was a virtual lock WarGames would come to the main roster.
It was then announced that two WarGames matches—one men’s, one women’s—would take place at Survivor Series, which was held Saturday night at TD Garden in Boston.
WWE put on its first main-roster WarGames matches, with the women’s match opening the show and a men’s match as the main event. It essentially replaced the elimination tag team matches that the Survivor Series show was first named for.
Levesque’s WarGames was different from the original Rhodes concept, which is, ironically, the AEW Blood and Guts match.
Levesque removed the top of the cage, changed the rules to allow pins, did matches beforehand to see which team would get the man advantage rather than the coin flip and changed the intervals between entrances.
The original War Games matches involved no weapons but lots of blood. The modern version was filled with weapons—tables, chairs, ladders and kendo sticks—but blading has long since been banned by WWE.
In looking at the now 35-plus-year-old concept and the modern changes, here are some thoughts:
- Removal of the top of the cage: While traditionalists decry any change, this is clearly for the better. The top was there in the past to make sure nobody could escape until somebody surrendered. But today, with the high flying moves off the top of the cage in the NXT version, and again in the women’s match Saturday, the removal of the top was a positive based on modern style. To combat the idea somebody could climb out, a rule was put in place that climbing out counts as surrendering and thus forfeits the match.
- Allowing the match to end by pin: This is easier for creative, and gives you far more options with finishes. It also allows for lots of near falls. Both matches Saturday ended via pin, and perhaps it’s not quite as strong a finality or as memorable as somebody having to quit; it allows far more latitude and ideas for the match itself. The old way makes for a stronger finish. The new way opens the door for a more exciting match.
- Eliminating the coin flip: The coin flip, of course, came from football. The current concept allows you to put some participants in a big television match to help build it up with the man-advantage going to the winner. That’s a positive, except that you can’t always have the heels win because in time it would get too predictable. But the match works far better with the heels’ having the advantage. In the men’s match Saturday, it was the babyfaces who had the numbers advantage and killed the obvious psychology. When the new face came in, there was no big pop, because the crowd wasn’t clamoring for it to even the odds after heels were taking advantage of the man advantage. But the men’s match was also unique in the sense that The Bloodline, the heels, were more popular—in particular Roman Reigns and Sami Zayn—than the babyfaces. So that match was built around a story where the question was whether Zayn would turn on The Bloodline, or they would turn on him. It ended when Zayn gave his longtime best friend and former best man at his wedding, Kevin Owens, a low blow. He then gave the person who seemed to hate him, Jey Uso, the opportunity to pin Owens, and Zayn showed his loyalty. And then they all hugged at the show’s climax. So even though they were heels, the match was set up for the hugs at the end to be the happy ending, although obviously it is far from the end of the story.
- Blood vs. weapons: WWE doesn’t do blood. So that part of WarGames is different. AEW does blood, and to fans of the original concept, its rules were similar. But AEW changed things, as well, by allowing people to escape the cage and involve participants fighting on the roof, a concept taken from WWF’s famous Undertaker vs. Mankind Hell in a Cell match. The weapons style was popularized in TNA’s Lethal Lockdown, where the match ended up being filled with weapons shots. On Saturday, it felt like the weapons were overdone and made it too much like WWE weapons matches that take place all the time on television and at most house shows.
- Time intervals: This is the one where the Rhodes concept was superior. The entrance periods being extended from two to three minutes on paper didn’t seem like anything but a change. In practice, it lengthened the match in theory from 21 minutes to 29 minutes before the match could end. WWE did shave time off and got that 29 down to 27–28 minutes. But in both matches, those periods did not have the immediacy or the excitement of the old version. On Saturday, both matches went more than 38 minutes. The War Games with the highest levels of excitement were less than 30 minutes. With the two-minute intervals, the match felt like a high-speed intense battle. The adding of time in each period made it seem like they were dragging things out, and you were waiting too long to get to the destination, rather than it feeling more natural.
- Two WarGames on the same show: This is just how WWE has evolved, with giving women the same matches as men. There are two Royal Rumbles on the same night, two Money in the Banks and now two WarGames. It’s harder for the second match on the show because of the redundancy aspect. The key, as Saturday’s event showed, is to try to make them as different as possible. It doesn’t matter which works better, as the singular one does feel more special, but in 2022’s WWE, there are going to be two. And you have the chance for two excellent matches when performed at a high level. Plus, if the concept itself is established, if done on one show a year, it can be like the Rumble in the sense it’s a show that will always be successful and anticipated, whether the product is hot or cold at the time.
In the end, War Games as a concept, whether it’s the Dusty version, the Levesque version or the Tony Khan version, has been historically successful at the key aspects of wrestling. It gets more people interested in seeing the match and then usually delivers a match that lives up to very high expectations and standards. It allows 10 people to be in a headline match and hopefully helps elevate a few to a higher level. There are both positive and negative arguments for the changes put in place. But ultimately for next year, whether it’s WWE or AEW, they can evaluate and learn from all the different concepts and create the best of all worlds.
After the show, Levesque wouldn’t tip his hand as to what is next. It’s obvious WarGames will be done again, and probably annually. He indicated the elimination matches that Survivor Series was originally based on could be back as well.
