Let's confuse the issue immediately by pointing out that professional wrestling isn't strictly speaking "choreographed". There's no-one scripting out the matches move for move, there's no rehearsals, not that there would be time for any rehearsals given the schedule of full time wrestlers anyway. Although it's not "scripted", the wrestlers are naturally working together with each other, they may be exchanging signals in the ring or have a few sequences in the match planned beforehand, however they may not even speak the same language and end up building their match in the ring together on instinct alone. There also may be someone called an "agent" working on the match backstage, telling the guys what kind of story they should be telling and how long they have, but if the crowd completely rejects the match that might all get thrown out in favour for something they come up with on the fly.
If you're one of the uninitiated that opening paragraph was probably a bit of a headache, which is partly the fault of the writer but the true problem is professional wrestling is extremely hard to define because it encompasses elements of so many forms of performance art and media. It's got the atmosphere and a lot of the psychology of a live sporting event but it's not an athletic competition, it has angles and storylines that are planned out and written yet there's a lot of improvisation, and it's understood that wrestlers are performers portraying a character yet the audience is somewhat expected to care about the real human beings as well. "Sports entertainment" might actually be the best term for it since it can't be comfortably locked into one or the other, but then again "sports entertaiment" is a trash marketing term dreamed up by the WWE, so we'll just stick with "wrestling".
With all that said, how can you possibly expect to replicate this within a videogame?
Well for the longest time the basic answer to that question was "don't bother". Early wrestling games kept it simple, like more methodical slower-paced (and pretty dull) fighting games. As we got into the mid-to-late 90s things starting speeding up; there were the completely nonsensical Mortal Kombat style arcade fighters which involved the Undertaker shooting souls across the ring and the British Bulldog literally turning into a Bulldog. At home the AKI engine titles on the Nintendo 64 focused on grappling, while on the PlayStation the Smackdown! games went for a much simpler button mashing approach at a much higher game speed which made it a hit at parties.
Somewhere along the line as the Smackdown! series took over and became the main WWE wrestling videogame franchise (later morphing into the Smackdown Vs Raw franchise and eventually into the WWE 2K titles that are released today) and the focus of each title seemed to shift towards simulation. Matches are governed by momentum, reversals are limited and recharge slowly, wrestlers get exhausted as the match goes on to the point where you can take 15-20 seconds to get up after your own move...and it's AWFUL.
In WWE 2K16 the entire game feels like it's taking place underwater and it only gets worse the longer matches go. Despite supposedly being world class athletes anyone in the roster will collapse from exhaustion after running one lap of the hilariously tiny ring, there's an uncomfortable delay on button presses, animations on moves have too much startup and cooldown times and feel awful for it, and every so often on a hard strike or a large slam the screen will wobble slightly in a pathetic attempt to make this game feel like something. What is causing this? How can these games feel so bad after all this time? How have they actually regressed and got less fun over the years? Well, either Yukes somehow found the only 300 Japanese game developers in the world who have never played Street Fighter or a game by Treasure to program the series, or there's something fundamentally wrong at the core of these games.
The first question you have to ask yourself when you're approaching a wrestling game from a simulation standpoint is "what exactly are we simulating here?" What is the mindset of the player supposed to be? Are we taking the role of the wrestler within the context of the fiction by trying to win the match? Are we supposed to be the performer and attempt to have the best match possible and make the fans happy? Or are we a promoter pulling the strings and attempting to manipulate all the elements into the show we want? Unfortunately, the recent efforts from the WWE 2K series have no real answer for this, so instead opt to be a lumpy soup of unconnected systems, mechanics and ideas that will push the events into something that "sort of" looks like a match you would see on television.
When you're trying to run a simulation while giving a human being a participatory role all of wrestling's contradictions start to collapse on top of one another. It's presented as a contest and a fight, so the game has combos and you can "out-wrestle" someone by utilising your limited amount of reversals more effectively, but at the same time it's performance art and you're supposed to be entertaining people, so the game punishes you for using the same moves too often. Street Fighter doesn't punish you for doing the same moves over and over again, you can win a match by hitting 15 shoryukens in a row, but the reason that won't work on most players is because it's easy to counter and punish. In other words, in traditional fighting games the systems and mechanics are tools placed in the hands of the player(s), in modern wrestling games the systems and mechanics are used to keep the player(s) in line so they can't go too far off script.
Not to claim that system-based games are incapable of producing dramatic narratives, that's certainly not true in other genres and hell it even works by accident in the WWE 2K games from time to time, but it's hard to imagine a wrestling game being successful taking this approach. The systems in WWE 2K instruct us that we can only use counters so many times, that we can only make one major quick-time event comeback a match, that wrestlers' mobility and stamina should be severely cut down by the end of a match. They don't allow for John Cena to fire up that one last time and get all the kids in the crowd to jump out of their seats, because he's already had his one allocated attempt at a comeback this match. So even though these systems of momentum, stamina, reversals, damage and finishers may create an imitation of the structure of a wrestling match, they will fail to capture the drama every single time.
After all that, by attempting to simulate a wrestling match through systems and mechanics, all Yukes have achieved with their recent WWE 2K efforts is create games that aren't fun to play, are illogical from a competitive standpoint and utterly fail to capture what they're supposed to be a pastiche of. In the end, we're not taking the role of the wrestler, the performer or the promoter when we play these games, we're a little kid bashing two Wrestlemania action figures together until we make too much noise and our mum makes us stop.
So it's no surprise that the more fondly remembered wrestling games don't bother with any of that stuff. The best wrestling game to come out in years, WWE All Stars, couldn't care less about simulation or realistic. The character models are cartoonish exaggerations of the wrestlers they depict, the moves are absurd, wrestlers will bounce off the ground and can be juggled in the air, it's a big hot bowl of steaming nonsense. Yet, despite throwing off all the shackles of reality it ends up feeling like a better celebration of the original art form than the games that try to directly mimic it. It recognises wrestlers for the ridiculous over the top personalities that they are, it takes all the cool stuff they do in real life and uses the videogame form to enhance it, then presents this to a virtual crowd that loves every second of it. It makes you feel good about the magic of professional wrestling as a whole and how you value these personalities and the real life people portraying them; Hulk Hogan may have never actually jumped 45 feet into the air on a leg drop, but WWE All Stars makes you realise how much you always wanted him to.
There you go VIDEOGAMES, you jerks, there's what you need to do if you want to celebrate the events and moves of a professional wrestling match within your medium. Don't make wrestlers feel like their legs are made out of lead and have them gasping for air within 5 minutes, just before they get beaten up with zero defensive options because they used up their allocated number of reversals. Don't make your game deliberately unfair because sometimes cheap finishes happen on the television show. Instead, portray wrestlers as the superheroes and the real life fighting game characters we all want them to be, let them control the matches with their own ridiculous actions and abilities, take the best and most awe-inspiring things they do and run with them as far as you can. After all, it's not like anyone can get hurt!
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