Let's Play A Terrible Wrestling Video Game, TEW 2020
I've been feeling the call to play TEW 2020 again. This is a text-based pro wrestling management video game that just sucks so much ass. That screen you see above? That is the main window and it cannot be resized. Seriously, I'm fairly certain every menu in this game is just an image file with clickables put over it. Nightmarish.
Anyways, the cool thing is that people make their own mods for this game, either building up entire fictional wrestling universes (the game comes with it's own version of this, the CornellVerse, that has been building and changing with each entry) or mapping out the mod-makers approximation of the real world. Today, we're going to be making a new company using Real World Chronicles 2023, the June 2023 edition.
Anyways, let's start our save!
Now. I'm playing with a larger mod database, which means there's a lot of data to crunch, but like... this hangup happens anytime I play this game unless I'm playing an "organic" save (you start w/ the bare minimum in the database and let the game generate new stuff), but this always freaks me out.
Now we have to pick who we're playing as and folks... this list is a doozy.
Usually what I like to do is start with a created User Avatar (I think that's what this game calls player characters), where I set their stats up basically to the max but I never have them do in-ring work, usually just commentary. I... forgot to do that this time. I don't wanna back out, so I'm just gonna pick someone who is closest to me in age. In this case, I'm playing as Poppy who I guess has worked closely with WWE's NXT brand to make music for them??? She's 28, I'm 29, I've already imposed this rule on us.
The second thing we set is "User Talents". These traits (Negotiating, Motivating, Creativity, Leadership, Diplomacy, and Silver Tongue) will help and hinder us in certain ways, and we will get more points for every X number of shows we run. At the start we have 30 points, along with some template options. Usually I do not care about this and pick Jack of all Trades to get 5 across the board. But let's go full chaotic and do Lucky Dip. This will give every one of our stats a random number, so our total could be higher or lower than the initial 30.
That's... not great? So negotiating is maxxed out, which means we can really have our way in contract negotiations. Diplomacy is also high at 9, which means when incidents happen back stage we should be able to handle them better. Leadership of 5 is basically neutral, and would give us a passive bonus to backstage/locker room morale. Creativity of 3 is less than neutral, and handles Gimmick changes and Heel/Face turns. Silver Tongue at 1 is awful, that handles how we can talk workers into doing angles/matches they may not be jazzed about. Finally, Motivating is at 0 and this means our workers will likely have loads of "off" days. This is 28 points total, so we missed out on 2 points and the spread is bonkers. We cannot reroll this. We must move on.
Next thing we can tinker with is Preferences. This will impact how our matches and promos are rated, which impacts how our shows are rated, which impacts how our audience perceives us, and on and on. There's a lot here, but I keep it on "Standard" from the drop down and also add "Enable Dirt Sheet" since that will tell us what is providing positive or negative impacts on matches and promos. It'll really help us figure out what is or isn't working on our shows!
Now we could start with an already established company (WWE, Impact, AEW, etc) with this, but I always prefer to make my own way in the world. We will start as Unemployed and make our own company!
Here's our start screen. It's... a lot. This will be good to see when new wrestlers get generated, or when other companies go under or let go of people, but for right now we do not care about this. We care about the "Start Own Company" button. And I happened to throw together a logo and a name, so we should be good to set up True Power Wrestling. And it's time for yet another awful menu.
This used to be better and worse in some ways. In the last game, TEW 2016, you used to build your own product based on a handful of different axis ("Mainstream", "Realism", "Comedy", etc.) and how important they were to the types of shows you were putting on so you could fine-tune what you wanted your audience to care about, and what may or may not be fit for television. It was a worse menu, but allowed you some cool options to really make the product you always wanted. In TEW 2020, the devs have effectively laid out that people were "gaming" the product setting system, and there's only so many distinct types of wrestling that exist or could exist, so they've just made a drop-down of all the wrestling products they think are possible. If you have an idea for a product type you think is missing from the game you can ask nicely on the forums and they will maybe add it in a future update.
I'm not gonna go over what each and every product is, but I'm going to use the Family Friendly Pro Wrestling product you see above. In my mind I'm thinking "what if my idealized version of 90s/2000s Cartoon Network had a wrestling show". 70/30 Match and Promo split for TV shows, 85/15 for events, wrestlers are rated 30/70 on in-ring performance vs popularity, and we really want the matches to be family friendly. No high-risk moves, no spinal-impact moves, and "called in the ring" means that our workers will know how long a match needs to go and who's winning, but otherwise no other planning is happening.
Additionally, I'm starting under the "Rock Hard" conditions. This means our company will be barely known, have 0 prestige, and start w/ $2,500 in the bank. We will be changing that dollar amount soon, but I love to play "Backyard to Global" style where we start as complete unknowns and see how popular we can get before I run out of steam.
We have started True Power Wrestling. This will be our actual main screen, as this hellish menu will be how we make changes to our product. But first, let's see what the internet says Poppy's net worth is.
Uhhh I forgot how nightmarish those types of sites are, but the number I'm getting is between $1-3 Mil. I'll say Poppy is putting $1 Million of her own Net Worth into True Power Wrestling.
Now we gotta start looking for workers. Poppy is a Personality, which means she'll talk on-screen and be a personality, but she's not gonna do any in-ring work. She will not take a pile-driver. So we gotta find literally everyone else: Wrestlers, Refs, Announcers, Commentators, Road Agents, & Managers. Let's look at the "Workers" tab.
An overload of information, but! We're only looking for a couple things right now: Psychology, Popularity, if they will work for us, and if they are a good backstage presence. Psychology is just a rating of "can they tell a good wrestling story in the wrestling ring", so that'll be good for our actual show ratings. By clicking "Search" we can narrow down what workers will show up in this tab.
I'm not going to go through every single worker we add this way, but know I'm messing around with these filters to get us workers. When I find a worker who looks like they may be a good fit, I click negotiate and I get this:
Now you gotta make a contract offer. There are handshake deals and written deals, with either of them having the option to be "exclusive" so they can't work elsewhere. I usually try to make the numbers multiples of 10, and a little higher than what the game tells me to give just so the workers are in a good mood. As a backyard promotion, even with $1 Mil at your disposal, there is no way you're going to get exclusive deals this early on so I just make regular written agreements. This way everything is locked in for a set time and the payments don't fluctuate before contract negotiations, and if I let them go before the contract is up they gotta be paid which is just good for these digital workers.
When I do this, I usually make 2 templates at first: 1 Yr Wrestler and 3 Yr Worker. For wrestlers, especially just starting out your company, you don't know who is or isn't gonna work or be Your Guys, ya know? This way they get a year of work in (about 12 shows) and you can get a feel of who you wanna build around. For the 3 Yr, I keep that for Everyone Else. I think of it like superhero comics, ideally even if the writing team changes, there's some aesthetic connections and stability if you keep the pencilers/inkers/colorers the same. My commentary team, my refs, my on-screen personalities, my road agents, they are that aesthetic stability. And it means I don't have to worry about them on top of my wrestlers.
After spending the better part of 15-30 mins looking through the workers I can hire, here are notables: Shane McMahon (dunno what I'm gonna do with him, but it won't be in-ring work), Brian Zane (commentary, I watch this dude's YouTube videos!), and the Da Vinki guys (The Voros Twins! Guess I have to have a tag division for them). Usually what I'll do is grab who I can, about 10-20 wrestlers, 1-2 refs, 1 road agent, 2-3 commentary people, and then wait for the negotiations to come back. From there I can see who has tag partners I didn't hire yet, and see if I missed any other types of workers.
I still have other things to do while I wait. First, let's look at our Title situation.
A normal menu. I'm going to create our Primary title, the True Power Title, and our Secondary title, the Rising Star title. True Power will be our World Heavyweight, the top title everyone has dreams of. Rising Star will be the stepping-stone, our equivalent of a US or Intercontinental title. Might even have it so in-universe the champ of the Rising Star title can vacate their title to make a True Power title match, add a little Money In The Bank flavor.
You can actually purchase a retired title, which is kinda handy! As a backyard promotion, the True Power title only has a prestige of 30. There are some on the market with 45 prestige! But I'll hold off on that, we'll wait to at least have our first year of shows before doing that.
Now... we wait. I don't have any workers, negotiations don't happen the same day, so we gotta move forward. I click those double arrows on the upper left hand side and tell the game to advance a week, for next Monday. The game stops at Wednesday, and we have some updates! The Voros Twins and Brian Zane wanna join in on this, along with about 5 other workers. A ref who I didn't realize was retired rejected us, but this is why we put out so many feelers!
Since we have Zane as a commentator we'll set him for every Event moving forward. We haven't scheduled any yet since we don't have our full roster just yet, but that's okay! We're ready. Let's move forward in time a little more, still aiming for Monday of Week 2, June 2023.
Thursday of Week 1, June 2023 and we get basically everyone else signed on. We've got a ref, we've got a road agent, we've got it all! We don't need a minimum number of wrestlers as we're such a small promotion, but we do need enough to run shows using a Heel/Face split (good guy/bad guy split) and we need at least one of each of those other non-wrestling positions.
I push us forward once more to Monday of Week 2, and we get stopped again. On Friday we sign Shane McMahon. My idea with him is to have him be some type of personality, probably a CEO trying to destroy True Power Wrestling? I dunno, we haven't even done our first show yet.
All this, and we still haven't run a show. And we still won't! I'm tired and don't wanna play anymore today lmao. Next time we'll plan and run our first True Power Wrestling show!
See ya!
