The “Wrestle Jam” game in ‘The Wrestler’

After I was blown away by ‘The Wrestler’ I immediately wondered how they were able to create a fake, but very real looking NES game called “Wrestle Jam”. Well a brother sister duo in Kristyn Hume and Randall Furino created the 8bit looking game from SCRATCH! That is freaking awesome.

“Darren is a little bit unconventional,” Hume said of the Wrestle Jam project, saying that the director wanted a fully functioning demo for Rourke and D’Leo to interact with. “It ended up being a working game. He wanted the actors to be able to play the game instead of them trying to act like they were playing.”

“And I didn’t want to hand animate the entire game because it would be way too time consuming,” Hume said.

That meant that Furino, a tools programmer at Denver area developer NetDevil, had to program Wrestle Jam from the ground up, writing rendering, input, and artificial intelligence routines for the two playable characters, Randy “The Ram” Robinson and The Ayatollah.

“[Wrestle Jam is] completely playable. There was an intro screen, character select, win / loss conditions, opponent AI, eight different attacks,” Furino explained. “It was as close to a genuine old-school wrestling game as I could make it in the time allowed. I even mapped an old Nintendo controller to the input system so they could play it that way.”

How amazing is that! They really created a fully playable Nintendo game for the movie.

Not only did they make an entire game, but they also had to score it, which was done by Joel Feinberg.

Feinberg’s original direction for the Wrestle Jam score was surprisingly different from the final product.

“Originally they wanted it to sound like ‘Bang Your Head’ from Quiet Riot, but you know you have to be really careful doing something like that because it could end up costing you a lot of money,” Feinberg said. “At the time there was no real buzz for this movie so things were tight. This was really a low budget film.”

That Quiet Riot track would become Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s signature track, used during his approach to the ring.

Feinberg also took direction from Nintendo’s classic Pro Wrestling for the NES.

You can hear the final version that appears in the movie in this video from Youtube.

I think this is one of the most surprising parts of ‘The Wrestler’ now that I know how they did it and the work that was put into it. Thanks to Kotaku for the heads up..