Games - Extreme Warfare

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	Games - Extreme Warfare

Extreme Warfare is a series of professional wrestling management text simulators created by British programmer Adam Ryland for the PC since 1995.

Games in the series

Classic Extreme Warfare

Extreme Warfare was originally thought up as a card based role-playing game based on wrestling. Ryland got an industrial-sized pack of postcards and cut them up to form cards featuring such things as wrestler and location. It ended up as an extremely low-tech 2-player promoter game, with rules that basically got changed on the fly to make the game more exciting. The problem was that the game consisted of about 900 cards, most of which were only a few inches in size, so they kept getting lost and that it took about an hour to set it up each time. With this, Ryland decided to recreate this game on a computer. The first Extreme Warfare on the PC (now called Extreme Warfare 1) was programmed in 1995 in QBasic. This game was merely a simple simulator, where one could decide what matches were to take place and who was going to win them but also involved some simple financial elements, such as wrestler's wages. Due to limitations in QBasic, Ryland moved the series over to Turbo Pascal where more incarnations of the game were created. These included:

Extreme Warfare 2
Extreme Warfare 2000
Extreme Warfare 2001
Extreme Warfare 2002
Extreme Warfare 5000
Extreme Warfare 6000
Extreme Warfare 7500
Extreme Warfare 9000

Each version of the game was an upgrade of the previous and continually built on the ideas of booking matches and running the business side of a professional wrestling promotion. Currently, only games from 2002 to 9000 can be found on the Internet for download. After release of EW 9000, Extreme Warfare met its main rival. A game called Promotion Wars was released by fellow British programmer Adam Jennings, taking some inspiration from both Extreme Warfare 9000 and Championship Manager. After the game's release, some of Extreme Warfare's fan base shifted their interest over to this game when released in October 2000.

Extreme Warfare Deluxe

On April 1, 2001, Extreme Warfare Deluxe (EWD) was released. This was a significant game in the series in that it was the first ever game in a while to be built by scratch instead of an upgrade of which the previous games were.

EWD expanded on the previous games in terms of the actual game world. The game world was expanded in that everyone in the database can now be hired by any promotion, unlike previous games in which WWF superstars can only be hired by the WWF, with the same applying for WCW and ECW. This helped to bring more competition between promotions, which now had their own AI. Also included in EWD was the match report screen which featured stats about the match quality, crowd reaction and worker effort of the match along with an overall rating. This setup would end up being the basis of all match report screens in later games in the series up to and including TEW 2004.

At first, Ryland announced that Deluxe was going to be the final game of the series but shortly afterwards, he changed his mind and decided that he will make a new Extreme Warfare game. With the limitations of Turbo Pascal now pushing this game to the limit, Ryland decided in October 2001 to start work on a brand new game in the EW series.

Extreme Warfare Revenge

Arguably the most popular game of the series, Extreme Warfare Revenge (EWR) was released on June 15, 2002. Now programmed in Visual Basic, the series now took a Windows style interface. One of the most significant changes this game took to the series was the fact that everything on a wrestling event is under the control of the user. In previous games in the series, angles, finishes and (in EWD) interviews were randomly created. This also coincided with the new feud system that was to count the matches, angles and interview victories between the workers involved. The match reports also took a slight change, featuring reviews of the matches from such Internet columnists as Scott Keith instead of a straight play-by-play style. However, the report style would revert back to its old style in TEW 2004.

Another major feature that changed the way the game was played was the way the game world was represented. Unlike the previous games in which it was mostly focused on the major promotions such as the WWF and WCW, the promotion size feature meant many promotions in North America could now be included from the global sized promotions like WWE to the cult sized promotions like RoH to a mere backyard federation.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Extreme Warfare ]

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