Akdown

It was my Junior year of high school, and I belonged to a group of friends that were obsessed with video games and professional wrestling. We weren’t meatheads, per se, but when we got together, we often acted as such. I would go to my friend Jonathan’s house, we would fire up his Sega Saturn, and we would play these terrible professional wrestling video games. They would handle poorly, the graphics wouldn’t impress anybody, and it was very stupid, juvenile, and overall harmless fun. One such week, we used the create-a-wrestler function to create our own personal and horrific abominations. We would program their moves, their finishers, their celebrations, everything; we fashioned them after psychopathic clowns in the vein of the Insane Clown Posse (we were stupid teenagers; I’ll apologize for nothing). We played our characters against Stone Cold Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, The Rock… and we had a blast.

Finally, one of us (I assume Jonathan) decided to try and set up our created wrestlers against these professional wrestling legends, and let the computer control both wrestlers. And we watched it, like our own personal pay-per-view. It was way more intense and way more fun than it ever had any right to be. Eventually we played one created wrestler versus another created wrestler, and suddenly things got heated and competitive, and we found ourselves talking about it at school, in class, challenging each other in the hallways, and then racing back to Jonathan’s house after school to see the newest battles go down.

After weeks of doing this, video game developer THQ published a new video game called “Smackdown.” It was a better video game in every respect: better graphics, better engine, better spectacle. Better everything. One of our nerdy meathead collective, a kid named Akayomi, came to me one day at school trying to organize a very intricate system around the whole “Create-a-Wrestler” thing for the new game.

Akayomi loved writing, and I was growing more and more in love with the idea of flexing my creative muscles, as well. He came to me with this idea that we would take our little wrestling club, so to speak, and make created wrestlers for everyone involved. We would build match cards for each event, with 5-8 matches on each card. We would simulate the matches with computers controlling all the wrestlers involved, and then Akayomi would write up play-by-play for each event. And so we did, and slowly, week-by-week, the club grew. More friends wanted their own wrestlers created, and more wanted to challenge others to digital wrestling matches. It got to the point where Akayomi couldn’t manage the amount of weekly writing involved, so like a good friend would, he came to me for help.

The proposition was a good one: we would have a draft, where I would manage one “show” with my stable of characters, and Ak would have his own “show” and stable. And once a month, we would have all of our friends over and we would do a “pay-per-view” with a huge title card where we would fight for big stakes and championship belts. It was an absolute blast; a nerdy blast, but a fun one, nevertheless. Akayomi and I continued to do this through high school and through our freshman year of college, and once a month, all of our friends would get together for stupid, innocent nonsense.

What I learned from my writing these fictional matches was that I appreciated internalized conflict and drama. Akayomi and I would compare notes, critiquing and better one another’s writing, and it was a relationship that I truly appreciated. One such criticism came when he informed me that I was trying a little too hard to push dramatic stories over what he had originally built, which was just stupid, action-packed fun. Ak wrote these stories as a way to emulate the wrestling commentators of our day, so the high-browed dramatic storytelling went out the window in favor of low-brow, schlocky humor and action. And he was right: the kids at our school that read our stuff were entertained by the idiocy of it all.

When my girlfriend of the moment broke up with me, we unceremoniously killed off her created wrestler, and I began a storyline where my created character was being accused of her murder. I incorporated a murder mystery courtroom drama in the middle of my juvenile pro wrestling play-by-plays. One character had a subplot where he was being driven insane by the Satanic demon-worshiping rituals he used to gain his strength. Two other wrestlers started a Romeo and Juliet-style romance. Akayomi politely critiqued my work, telling me to understand my audience: “they just wanna read about one guy smackin’ another guy with a chair until they die.” And that was that. He was right. There is a time and place for drama, and pro wrestling write-ups was not it.

Through college, Akayomi and I continued to work and write together on all kinds of nerdy projects including wrestling, comics, and even fan-fiction. We haven’t talked much about writing in a good, long while, but I assure you, I look forward to seeing what he has to say when he finally gets to read my high-brow drama, now that I’ve finally found the time and place.