FORUM HOME > TNM > Discussion
The Martel Factor

Glum76Posted on 09/23/05 at 07:39:26

Okay.   This one's an odd discussion topic, so stick with me.....Think "wrestler's skills and character augmented and totally changed/embellished in TNM to account for misperception as a kid" to get you through the setup.

When I was a kid, I saw AWA Wrestling on TV once.   It was back in the days when the NWA and AWA had a co-promotional agreement.   Anyway, the show that I watched spent a large amount of time hyping then champion Rick Martel versus Stan Hansen for the AWA World Title.

Somehow, I never watched that show again.  I don't know if it was canceled or not, but I never saw it after that.   Soon after, I saw AWA action figures popping up in stores.   I, of course, begged my parents to buy me several packs of figures and the accompanying ring for my birthday and Christmas.

One of the packs of wrestlers was of course, Rick Martel.   Those old AWA figures were strange in that they potrayed average wrestlers as having amazingly muscular bodies.   Anyway, I pulled out my Rick Martel figure and thought he was a bad-ass.

Over the course of the next year or so, I created a wrestling figure circuit where Rick Martel was the undisputed king.   Since I didn't know his moveset (having only watched AWA once), I created one for him that included powerslams, press slams, superplexes, vicious chops, and flying clotheslines.  During a big action figure "supercard,"  I had Martel come out to "Back in Black" by AC/DC and had him avenge an earlier attack from Larry Zybsko in a big steel cage match.

Not a year later, I got to know Rick Martel in the WWF, and I found out that he was French-Canadian, wrestling and speaking in ways that absolutely conflicted with my initial idealistic view of him!

Many years after that, when I discovered TNM, I went nuts and created mutliple circuits.   In one of my circuits, I had Rick Martel as my top "bad-ass" babyface.   To make him the Rick Martel that I remembered from my youth, I redid his moveset from scratch and pretended he wasn't Canadian and didn't have an accent.

That was a long set-up to an obvious question:   Have you "mis-imagined" a real wrestler that you weren't familiar with and gave him a completely different character in TNM?
FormulaFirebird91Posted on 09/23/05 at 09:05:58

I don't think I've ever actually done that... but when I was younger I made a bunch of paper cut outs of ever wrestler in the WWF at the time. Colored them to look like their real life counterparts with markers (They were like an inch tall if that) Not really the same thing but your idea of having the action figure super card reminded me of those 30 or so little cut outs I had. I made a ring out of a plastic box and had huge matches. lol Thank god for TNM... I can still use my imagination like I did back then only I can disguise it so it seems like an adult thing to do. :D

Great story though... even if I have never mis-managed anyone in that way that I can think of.
UnrightPosted on 09/24/05 at 00:44:46

For a while I was playing with the other good simulator out there (EWR) and I liked to start up as a backyard fed and see how far I could take my fed (without losing interest).

One of the bargain wrestlers I always made sure to hire was Eddie Craven. I usually named him "Evil" Eddie Craven and he typically was just a magnificent bastard of a heel, even though his stats never measured up to my imagination.

Anyways, he was the jobber that was knocked out cold by Tyson Tomko last raw. He looked nothing like I always pictured him. Oh well.
WalkingCondominiumPosted on 09/25/05 at 17:20:06

On 09/23/05 at 09:05:58, FormulaFirebird91 wrote:I don't think I've ever actually done that... but when I was younger I made a bunch of paper cut outs of ever wrestler in the WWF at the time. Colored them to look like their real life counterparts with markers (They were like an inch tall if that) Not really the same thing but your idea of having the action figure super card reminded me of those 30 or so little cut outs I had. I made a ring out of a plastic box and had huge matches. lol Thank god for TNM... I can still use my imagination like I did back then only I can disguise it so it seems like an adult thing to do. :D

Great story though... even if I have never mis-managed anyone in that way that I can think of.
Not to hijack the thread, but Wow! I thought I was the only one who was the nerdy! I did the same thing, had 'cutouts' of all major stars from the mid eighties to mid ninties! So it was a natural extension for me to create the TNM Visiualizer pics  use...like these:



I have made hundreds of pics, I'll try to get them all online and share soon!

To stay on topic, when I played with these cutouts, it was a dice game, I had people I'd only ever seen in magazines, so I had no clue about movesets, mannerisms, etc. so I pretty much imagined my own for all those outside the WWF and NWA.

Joel
triad4evrPosted on 09/25/05 at 22:00:46

For me it was a little different experience. After the first Royal Rumble (the one that aired on network TV), I decided to start writing a wrestling game. Back in the day, we used little GI Joe figures or those rubber MUSCLE guys (the American version of that Kinnukiman or whatever the heck he's called) and at one point I had a ruleset that a bunch of my friends and I were using to run our own feds. To get back on topic, our feds would, from time to time, ship wrestlers to other players' feds to get some exposure- and my most famous mis-management (if you want to call it that) was with a guy a friend made that went by the name Wimpy Willaferd. He was basically a throwaway jobber that wore a paper bag on his head (kinda' like the Unknown Comic or whatever) but for some reason the gimmick appealed to me and some other friends that regularly played my fed. So, somewhere down the road, this cheesy gimmick wrestler became a superstar and eventually his terrible stats got better through all the exposure. He didn't win a lot, but you could get better in this game even by losing, it just took longer. When the original creator and I finally got back together again and played, I broke out the "new and improved" Wimpy Willaferd. To this day, my friend just shakes his head in disbelief that this lame jobber gimmick wrestler rose to the top of the heap in my federation and became a star.