WWF Smackdown 2 (PS1) Hidden Wrestlers (1/12): Stone Cold Steve Austin gameplay

Gameplay of the hidden wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin in Yukes’ WWF Smackdown 2: Know Your Role. Ah, Smackdown 2. Just hearing the menu music again brought a wave of nostalgia over me, it was amazing. I never played Smackdown 1, and I don’t have a reason to play it either as there are no hidden characters, only parts you only which can be used to make certain characters, which to me isn’t worth looking at. Smackdown 2 by comparison has a ton of hidden characters, and even a couple who are unused. More on that later down the line. Smackdown 2 really introduced me to wrestling. This was back when I was living in Dubai, and though my brother remembers it better than I do, wrestling was pretty ubiquitously popular there too. Bars (which were more family-orientated back then), used to show Raw (and some Nitro, if memory serves) most of the time, in a way which now is pretty weird to think back to. Most of my real introduction to wrestling game through video games, however. There were tons of arcades of Dubai at the time, with games often imported all over the world, so I was actually introduced to the likes of Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, Yokozuna and such through Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game of all things, which was a resident machine at the arcade I frequently most, along with Virtua Fighter 2, SpikeOut, Fighting Vipers 2, Dynamite Cop, and tons of other classic titles. Smackdown 2 was more my brother’s game, really, though I’d play it with him a decent amount here and there. It is most probably the reason for my love of hidden characters, now that I think back to it, and later on unplayable ones too. While some of the unlockables in this game are a bit duff (Mean Street Posse mainly, but we’ll get to them), Smackdown 2 was the game that made me realise just how powerful a good unlockable in a game could be. Case in point, Steve Austin. There are two things which I can recall really stunning me (stunnering me?) during my early days of gaming; the intro to Soul Blade, and Steve Austin’s goddamn intro in this game. Hell, even during the recording of this video I jumped at the glass-breaking sound effect, it still hits me even to this day. While a lot of the other Attitude Era guys were a bit goofy, or humorous in some way, Stone Cold was this kind of terrifying anti-hero who you loved for reasons you weren’t entirely sure why. The stunner is, in truth, a pretty silly move, but the way they booked it made it a terrifying force to be reckoned with. Something about a monster character like this was just mesmerising, and while WCW had done a decent job with The Giant, it didn’t quite have the same impact as Steve Austin would, to me anyway. Like many things, classic wrestling for me is one of those things I was partially into, so it’s super interesting to go back and fill in the gaps I have the on the subject, as was the case with fighting games. I don’t have to read about or hear highlights of anything anymore; if I want to watch every John Tenta vs. Big Bubba match, or rewatch Nash refer to “play” as an adjective, I can finally look at that over and over again. There’s also the same amount of awe and frustration from the existence of unplayable or unusable characters, and oh boy, there will be quite a few of those. Up next, another look at HBK, in one of his sillier looking incarnations.