What Is TNM?

At its core, TNM is a highly-specialized program to simulate wrestling matches move by move.

Picture yourself as the booker of your own promotion or promotions. You decide whom to hire. You decide which matches you put on which cards. Who gets the title shots? Who debuts? Your call.

The difference between a wrestling simulator and a game is that you don't actually play out the matches yourself. TNM does that for you and gives you the play-by-play as it happens.

25-Year Legacy

Development on TNM started in 1992 with the idea of creating a computer program which is able to randomly create 16-man singles elimination tournaments and act them out.

By the time the World Wide Web started gaining popularity in 1995, TNM had already matured to where it came with a wrestler editor and several more match types from tag team matches to elimination matches to battle royals and more. So when TNM 5 saw its first public release in 1995, it had already grown beyond just tournaments.

Since then, its focus has always remained on match play-by-play and circuits, bucking the trend of other wrestling simulators which often focused more on the business aspect behind running a wrestling promotion. Its plugin interface has allowed for both in-house and third-party extensions to the program's capabilities.

TNM is an "Unprecedented Concept"

TNM's match simulation engine remains virtually unchallenged in the genre, and the program itself as late as 2017 has been called an "unprecedented concept, and one that allowed for an even more unlimited set of possibilities" by Marcus K. Dowling.

In March 2020, Oliver Bateman wrote about TNM for MEL Magazine and said "The video game I played most back then, a text-based wrestling simulator called TNM, upended everything I knew about gaming".

TNM 7 Is A Text-Based Program...

Due to its immense complexity and keyboard-heavy user interface, TNM 7 has never been ported to Windows. No need to worry, though: It runs on any PC using any version of the Windows operating system. If your Windows version isn't able to run TNM natively, it will automatically start itself in an emulator named DOSBOX. All this is done without any user interaction and with zero configuration work on the user's part.

... With Windows-Based Plugins

All TNM plugins released since the year 2000 have been Windows applications in order to provide an optimal user interface and make use of Windows' expanded capabilities.

TNM Tournament Edition For Windows

In July 2020, the first TNM simulator for Windows was released. It specializes in running several different types of tournaments, from Single Elimination and Double Elimination tournaments, to Round Robin and Swiss-Rules tournaments and even Multi-Block Round Robins where the winners - or losers - then advance to another tournament to determine the overall winner.