Trigger warning: Everything negative associated with pro wrestling... but especially drug abuse and early death.

I had a grim thought today. I wonder, which pro wrestling game is the first where all the wrestlers in it are dead?

In a previous article I mentioned how covers of old wrestling games are depressing. Someone emailed me to ask why and answered their own question along the way. I'll paraphrase the message as "Why do you think old pro wrestling box art is depressing? Is it because most of them are dead?" Yes, that's why.

Time will catch up with all of us. It catches up with pro wrestlers even faster. I don't have hard statistics in front of me. I don't need them either. I'll confidently estimate their life expectancy is 10 years below average and anyone who tries to prove that number wrong will find I'm probably lowballing it. The stars of the 1980s-1990s who appeared on game covers were in their 30s-40s at the time. By today [June 2026] that puts most of them into at least their 70s.

Game covers featured the biggest stars. They, usually, didn't include the entire roster of the game. Finding covers with no living wrestlers is trivial. The rosters take a little more effort.

So, as of this writing [June 2026], are there any pro wrestling games where every wrestler in it is dead? If not, which games are most likely to be first?

This is the kind of question an LLM can probably answer quickly (oh, actually they can't). That's not how I draft articles, now or ever. I will use one to review this when I'm done, but that's it. Instead, I'll start with some heuristics:

• 8/16-bit games are the most likely for the obvious reason that they are the oldest. These games are 30-40 years old and no one lives forever. They also generally have fewer than 10 wrestlers in the roster.
• I'm only looking at American games. There are tons of Japanese games that could be considered. I'm skipping all of them for one, what I hope is again obvious, reason. Japanese wrestlers don't die prematurely at the same rate as American wrestlers. Blame steroids, drugs, and the U.S. healthcare system I guess.
• From the fifth generation on, licensed games should be skipped. With limited exceptions, these games had large rosters. A game with 30+ wrestlers is likely to include some that outlive you and me. This is a relief because I won't have to read an eventual email "correcting" this article to note that everyone in WWE Day of Reckoning on GameCube is dead.
• Hidden wrestlers would count as part of the roster. I'm not including announcers, referees, or other ancillary characters. I might note them if it is interesting.
• When I thought of this idea, I started writing about licensed games. By which I mean games linked to a wrestling promotion. Then I remembered all the games from the PlayStation 2 era like the Legends of Wrestling and the Backyard Wrestling games. Those games are strong candidates. The Legends of Wrestling games included many wrestlers who were already dead at the time they were published, for example.
• After writing that previous point, I remembered some games that have only one living wrestler involved. Think of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! for a non-wrestling example. All the boxers, except for Mike Tyson of course, are imaginary characters. There are wrestling games like this too. Although I think they are a different category from games with full rosters of real people.
• This is looking at games that include people who were at some point alive. I note this because, and this is exhausting to say... if I don't include this disclaimer, and even if I do, someone will "helpfully" remind me that no one in Pro Wrestling on the NES was ever alive. There are a lot of obsessive weirdos into video games. There are a lot of obsessive weirdos into pro wrestling. The overlap of these groups is a whole other level. I realize I am in that group.

I didn't have to look at games for very long to figure this out. So disappointing. I wanted this to take some work.

The first licensed pro wrestling game was MicroLeague Wrestling for the Commodore 64 and Atari ST originally. It later had DOS and Amiga ports. It featured Hulk Hogan (dead) on the cover. The only other wrestlers in the game are Randy Savage (dead) and Paul Orndorff (dead). There you go, three out of three. Their average age at death for them was 66, which is exactly 10 years lower than the life expectancy for males in the US at this moment. My guess is looking pretty good right now.

MicroLeague Wrestling had expansion disks, the 1980s equivalent of DLC, Those added - Harley Race (dead), Rick Rude (dead), The Honky Tonk Man (alive), Ted DiBiase (alive), Jim Duggan (shockingly alive), and Jake Roberts (even more shockingly alive).

Of the non-wrestlers featured in MicroLeague Wrestling... the dead ones are: Howard Finkel, Bobby Heenan, Lord Alfred Hayes, Bruno Sammartino, and Gorilla Monsoon. The still living ones are Vince McMahon and Jesse Ventura.

For early WWF branded games, I learned quickly that Ted DiBiase, The Honky Tonk Man, and Jim Duggan are all "spoilers".

WWF WrestleMania (NES, 1989): Everyone is dead except Ted DiBiase and The Honky Tonk Man.

WWF Superstars (Arcade, 1989): Everyone is dead except this trio (although Ted DiBiase is not playable, he appears in video clips only).

WWF WrestleMania Challenge (NES, 1990): Jim Duggan and Brutus Beefcake are the only living wrestlers.

WWF Superstars (Game Boy, 1991): Ted DiBiase is the sole survivor.

By WWF WrestleFest (Arcade, 1991), the list of living wrestlers starts to grow: Ted DiBiase, Jake Roberts, Sgt. Slaughter, and Smash.

And once we get to the 16-bit era, the rosters are already large enough to ensure there are multiple living wrestlers.

What about the WCW side?

Their first game is WCW Wrestling on the NES (1989). Compared to the first NES WWF game, its roster is huge. It has many living wrestlers: Ric Flair (how though?), Sting, Lex Luger, Mike Rotundo, Ricky Steamboat, Rick Steiner, and Michael Hayes. The dead list is: Hawk, Animal, Steve Williams, Kevin Sullivan, and Eddie Gilbert.

The living outnumber the dead. I can't help but notice a trend...

There was a whole big federal trial about the WWF, Vince McMahon specifically, providing wrestlers with steroids. The feds lost that trial, but, c'mon. It was obvious to anyone watching that WWF wrestlers in the 1980s were, on average, more jacked than WCW wrestlers. Ted DiBiase didn't look like a guy who took steroids. I don't know if he did either way, he just didn't look like it. He looked like an average 1980s dad - a dude who played high school football in the 1970s and did yardwork every weekend since then. He's also the one consistently alive person among the early WWF games. The dead list for WCW Wrestling has Hawk, Animal, and Steve Williams. Those are three dudes who look like they ate their morning cereal with steroids.

Counterpoint: Mike Rotundo and Ricky Steamboat both worked in the WWF prior to when WCW Wrestling was published. Sure, fine. Neither of them looked like superhumans.

I accept that nearly everyone in all these games took steroids at some point. That's not an accusation to any lawyers reading this. However, I think these games illustrate that wrestlers who used steroids to an extreme died younger than ones who didn't. This should not be a controversial idea.

This article is turning into quite a bust. So far I've found that a lot of wrestlers featured in video games die young, and a few live full lives. The latter group tends to be wrestlers who didn't look like massive steroid abusers. Jake Roberts didn't have the physique of a juicer, but he has a well-documented history of other substance abuse problems. I would not recommend hard drugs. They seem less dangerous than steroids to me now. I mean, sort of. I've never heard of someone OD'ing on steroids, it's probably happened but it's uncommon. Outside of an OD, the long term effects of steroids seem relatively worse. I'm not a doctor or an expert, my degrees are in computer science. Don't listen to me. I'm just going off what I observe in pro wrestling video games.

Alright, continuing with WCW games... WCW: The Main Event (Game Boy, 1994)... wow, a >30 year-old game where almost 80% of the roster is alive today.

I think I can skip a lot of games now. My original criteria was wrong. I have no problem ever admitting I was wrong.

I'm going to skip ahead to a few other games that I thought might have a 100% mortality rate.

Legends of Wrestling was a 2001 release featuring a roster of wrestlers not under any contractual obligation that prevented them from appearing in it. It's a really fun game BTW. It plays more like an arcade brawler than an attempt to simulate "real" pro wrestling.

The Legends of Wrestling roster featured many already deceased wrestlers like multiple Von Erich brothers, most of whom died too early to be previously represented in a video game. The roster is so huge that it has at least 6 currently living wrestlers. The two sequels are the same story.

As for the Backyard Wrestling games - I'm afraid to Google some of the names. ICP (both alive) are in both of them so I don't need to dig too deep.

My initial assumptions for this topic were wrong. That's cool. This happens all the time, I usually don't post about it though. This is roughly the 100th article that I started off with a premise that turned out to be wrong. It's maybe the 2nd I decided to post anyway.

Footnote: After finishing this article I decided to ask LLMs about this topic... the ones I checked all thought Hulk Hogan was still alive. He died on July 24, 2025 so they all based their response on knowledge that was at least 11 months old. One of them even became very standoffish with me when I asked it to try again with this updated fact.

Tags: Pro wrestling

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