If you played the MyRise storyline in WWE 2K23 you'll remember the scene where your character is washed up and unemployed, and takes work doing motion capture for a WWE video game. While this is kind of meta since your performing moves for motion capture that were themselves motion captured, it's also a bit of an inside joke as mo cap is generally done by indie wrestlers, some of whom even work for other promotions. With last years game plus a bit more out now, don't at me, I've played every single wrestling game since WWF Warzone, I thought I'd look for some interesting stories about wrestlers working on WWE games. Some you might know already, but maybe there'll be something you didn't.
1) LA Knight
I'm starting with the one you're most likely to know already, but do you know how much work LA Knight has put into the 2K games? It might not sound that surprising to hear of a current WWE star doing mo-cap for a WWE Game, but the former Eli Drake in an interview with Chris Van Vliet, noted that he had been doing so since 2015. To give that a bit of perspective, in 2015 Knight signed with Impact, and in 2017, during the time he was still working on WWE games, he was also the TNA World Champion. Well, we call it that today, but he won it during that weird Global Force Wrestling merger that got botched. It was a weird time in TNA's history but thats not the point. The point was he had achieved success elsewhere but was still working on WWE's video games.
Wrestlers don't just motion capture the moves, they even do all the taunts and even entrances of your favourite WWE stars. For many years a common criticism of LA Knight was that he was trying too hard to resemble the Rock, especially in his promo style. How ironic then that LA Knight claims to have done the mo cap for the Rocks entrance for 2K games. In the same interview he also says he helped with the entrances for Triple H and Goldberg among others. Perhaps most surprisingly he also claimed to have recreated R-Truths entrance. When you watch this entrance in full knowing that it's actually LA Knight, it's pretty impressive to be fair. Knight has said that the R-Truth entrance is the one he's most proud of.
In a more recent interview with Van Vliet, Knight says he can't do mo cap anymore as his schedule doesn't allow it, but he clearly has fond memories of doing it. He also says in this interview that he even did some of the very basic animations such as your character getting up off the ring mat, but also that his entrance in the most recent games isn't even done by him. Another thing he says thats kind of cool is that the mo cap talent get their actual entrances added into the game under a generic name as something of an Easter Egg. Some of these are old ones for characters from previous games, and others are a sort of nod to the mo cap talent, so a genuine Eli Drake entrance exists in at least some of the 2K games he worked on.
2) Shane McMahon
As I mentioned earlier, seldom does a WWE star get to do their own motion capture, but according to a video from WWE's YouTube channel, Shane requested to do his own ahead of WWE 2K18, because his kids played the games and thought his animations were a bit off. I hope LA Knight didn't do them and hear that diss from Shane's kids... In this feature we get to see Shane performing not just his own moves like the coast to coast and those shite punches, but also slams and suplexes too. Honestly if I were one of the mo cap guys in that studio and Shane McMahon in is the ring, I'd be getting him to do all kinds of moves he has no business doing. From Destino's, to Triple jump moonsaults, hell I'd even ask him to try a 630, you know he's going to try it. Safely, of course. I'd assume they use crash mats when possible. All of this amounts to Shane McMahon being the most authentic character to play in a WWE game, weirdly.
Lead cut scene animator Shane McPherson noted that when you choose to play as Shane McMahon, you are actually playing as Shane. That reminded me of the upcoming game The Wrestling Code, which has been in development for a fair while. They have embarked on an insane sounding mission to personally mo cap as much of their roster as authentically as possible. That sounds like an truly ambitious project and I hope it works out for them. Not sponsored by the way...
3) Jordynne Grace and Chris Bey
I'm putting these two together as they are both currently members of the TNA roster. I say currently because we still don't know what those hour glass tweets meant. Recently the TNA Knockouts champion made headlines by being one of the absolute highlights of the 2024 Women's Royal Rumble match, but that's not her first work for WWE technically. When a twitter user commented that Ivy Nile resembles the result of a union between Grace and Scott Steiner, Grace responded with the fact that she animated Nile's entrance for WWE 2K23.
Chris Bey has been credited work on a few 2K games, but the story that caught my eye was that he did at least some of the mo cap for 2K22, which had a Showcase mode dedicated to the career of Rey Mysterio. Bey has on Twitter noted that the move he is most proud of recreating is the famous moonsault into a DDT from Rey's match with Eddie Guerrero at Halloween Havoc 1997, a move that will always be linked with those two legends. Bey noted on twitter that it took him four takes to perfect the move, but perfect it he did.
This move from one of WCW's most famous cruiserweight matches ever appears to be an xbox achieve-aah PS trophy yeah thats it, for some wrestlers to unlock. One such wrestler is Ricochet, who once performed it in a match with Rey Mysterio himself for What Culture Pro Wrestling in Leeds England, a match I attended live by the way. Afterwards Ricochet made it known how much it meant to him to recreate that move with Rey himself. From YouTube channel Bryan Turner's VHS Rehab which by the way is a great channel to find rare wrestling footage, I found a clip from him of a very young Ricochet in only the second year of his career hitting the move at the Nashville fairgrounds, the former TNA asylum.
4) Austin Aries
For this one we go pre 2K to WWE '12, and while Aries did motion capture work too, this is more about his voice. For WWE '12 the former Ring of Honor and TNA world champion Aries lent his voice to that games fictional player insert character Jacob Cass. If you didn't know who Austin Aries was this won't have mattered to you at all, but as a TNA and ROH fan it was truly bizarre to hear his voice coming out of a created character.
Jacob Cass represents the first time time an assigned voice and personality was given to your created character in the career mode, rather than you being a current WWE star or being your own that the story would awkwardly never mention by name. In later years 2K would create their own characters that would even return in later games. Frankly the likes El Mago, Cole Quinn and later El Mago Jr would be commonly used as jobbers in my exhibition matches in these games. To my mind them being original characters taking up roster spots is only slightly better than umpteen versions of the same wrestler that are caused by the showcase mode in the most recent 2K games. Looking at you 2K20 with four Bayley's, three Becky Lynch's, five Charlottes' and four Sasha Banks'. Also for fairness, 2K22 and 3 with your million versions of Rey Mysterio and John Cena.
Getting back to Austin Aries, he would later be signed to WWE where he world work on NXT and later 205 live. He would even appear as himself this time as DLC in WWE 2K17. Aries would be released in July 2017, which was at first reported to be because he wasn't happy in his role, seeing himself as being above the cruiserweight division. A PW Torch source around this time claimed Aries was released for being a massive headache for everyone who had to work with him, even stating that he had a bad attitude, which was his reputation long before he went to WWE by the way, and maybe why you don't see him very often these days, with his last match for a major promotion being for NWA two years ago. Imagine how bad your reputation has to be for Billy Corgan to push white powder over you...
5) The Young Bucks
This entry is slightly different as the Bucks of Youth might not have actually worked on a 2K game, but an article I found from Uproxx tells a kind of interesting story. Back in 2017 they along with the Bullet Club might have been one of the hottest groups in wrestling. A month previous to what I'm getting to the Bucks as well as Cody Rhodes, Hangman Page and redacted showed up in the car park outside WWE Raw. Bullet Club caused such a stir that WWE eventually sent them a cease and desist letter, to stop them using the nWo's famous "too sweet" hand gesture. What does any of this have to do with WWE games? Well...
The Uproxx article references a report in the Wrestling Observer, saying that the very next day after the Bucks received the cease and desist letter, they received an invitation from 2K games to provide motion capture for WWE 2K18. According to Dave Meltzer "the 2K video game people asked them to work on motion captures (sic) for next years game because so many people in last years game were using the create-a-wrestler mode to play as the Young Bucks that they felt they needed to get all their signature moves in the game." Jesus Dave learn how to structure a sentence. Dave also notes that Bullet Club Funko pops were coming to Hot Topic soon, another excuse for me to play. (MC Lars "Hot Topic is not Punk Rock clip).
Whether the Bucks took this offer up I don't know, but I distinctly remember their old finishing sequence "More bang for your buck", and later the Meltzer driver being added to WWE games. When I was looking for footage of these moves for this video, I noticed that both 'More Bang for your Buck, and the Meltzer driver were included as part of the Moves pack DLC for 2K15, as evidenced by these clips by Youtuber Smacktalks. Given how these moves, especially the final moonsault in More Bang were performed, it's fair to say the Bucks didn't mo cap these, but maybe 2K wanted more polished versions for their later games. 2K15 was to be fair long before the peak of the Bullet Club, as well as the Buck's fame.
This story got me thinking about something I'd never considered before. Community creations must allow 2K a fascinating look at what non-WWE wrestlers people want to create most. This might be why certain moves like Will Ospreay's Storm Breaker, sorry, butterfly lifting twist cutter, were added as DLC into some games. Given that as I'm making this video Ospreay is about to debut in AEW, we might never see a genuine Storm Breaker of Oscutter in a WWE game, but we might see one in Fight Forever come 2032 maybe...
Sources:
LA Knight CVV clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J9ScXOOhuA
Shane McMahon WWE video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNOoKp2nLpI
Jordynne Grace: https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1483336/ordynne-grace-reveals-wwe-2k-motion-capture-work-current-wwe-star/
Chris Bey: https://gamerant.com/wwe-2k22-motion-capture-chris-bey/
Ricochet vs Rey Mysterio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqXWxGbfNRc
Moonsault DDT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6als7sfqabI
Aries WWE release https://www.pwtorch.com/site/2017/07/07/austin-aries-released-wwe-details-behind-released-whats-next/
Bullet Club at Raw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SngRskLscAw
Uproxx https://uproxx.com/prowrestling/wwe-young-bucks-motion-capture-video-game/
WON Bucks https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/october-16-2017-wrestling-observer-newsletter-wwe-hell-cell-review
WWE 2K15 Moves pack DLC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT8YaUSe_so&t=1s
