WWF SmackDown!

WWF SmackDown! brought professional wrestling to PlayStation with unusually smooth animation for its time and a wide roster of real WWF stars, including Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Triple H, and Undertaker, faithfully rendered as digital models complete with their signature entrances and moves. The game from studio Yuke's offered classic wrestling modes as well as a season-long Story Mode, in which the player worked through a series of matches connected by a simple story of rivalries between wrestlers, aiming to capture the federation's title. This story mode was new for the series and gave the otherwise purely combat-focused game a sense of progression and personal rivalry with chosen opponents.

The combat system built on a combination of grapples, submissions, and flashy special moves for each wrestler, with the game placing heavy emphasis on smooth transitions between animations — at the time one of the most technically demanding elements of wrestling games, and one that set it apart from the more jerky competing titles. Besides classic one-on-one matches, it also offered team matches, ladder matches, cage matches, and other popular wrestling formats, and players could customize their wrestlers to their own liking. The roster of playable characters was fairly large, ensuring variety in matches and letting players find their own favorite wrestler.

WWF SmackDown! became an exceptionally commercially successful title and kicked off a long-running and very popular wrestling game series that continued with further entries throughout the PlayStation 2 generation and beyond. The game's release also perfectly coincided with the peak of the WWF's worldwide popularity at the end of the nineties, the so-called Attitude Era, which brought it extraordinary attention even among casual players. For wrestling fans of the late nineties, it represented one of the high points of the genre on the console, and it's still remembered today as a nostalgic link to the WWF's contemporary global popularity.

Why play it: For wrestling fans, it's a nostalgic link to the peak of the Attitude Era and one of the starting points of a long-running and popular game series.