The Top 10 WWE Games of All Time

ign.com:

For the average wrestling fan, turning to WWE’s games is a safer way to live out your sports entertainment fantasies than, say, jumping off the roof of your garage through a flaming table. Since the late 80s there’ve been well over 50 such games that have averted countless such ill-advised* attempts to be a pro wrestler at home, all wearing the WWF/E banner. And while it’s as difficult to parse out the incremental improvements from one year to the next as it is to kick out of a Tombstone, here’s an attempt at narrowing down the 10 best WWE games of all time.**

To start with, we didn’t book this list all by ourselves without consulting our roster. The IGN audience participated in a Face-off, giving us a capacity crowd's worth of data to work with. There are a handful of surprises and no small dose of nostalgia for the Attitude Era that showed up in the results, but without further ado or wrestling wordplay,*** let’s ring the bell.

At number 10 with a win percentage of 65% in our Face-off, we find ourselves in the heady days of the mid-aughts with 2004’s WWE SmackDown! Vs. Raw. The game represents a fairly major shift for WWE as well. The Attitude Era was coming to an end and the silly Invasion storyline was getting smaller in the rearview mirror. Meanwhile, the brand split between Raw and SmackDown that happened just a few years prior was popular enough to gamble on rebranding the SmackDown series of games.

The Clean and Dirty mechanic was a weird little blast as well, giving even the kayfabe-iest fans a chance to lean into a gimmick and be rewarded for it. Meanwhile, the stare down and test of strength style mini-games, including a bra and panties match spanking mechanic that snuck in at the tail end of the Attitude Era's influence, offered a little more of what the live wrestling events featured on TV. You could also create your own belt in a Create-a-Championship mode for when creating yourself in a wrestling game just isn’t enough.

The Royal Rumble of WWE games,