THQ Nordic publishing AEW: Fight Forever; wrestling games now almost a circle

rockpapershotgun.com:

All Elite Wrestling announced like, I dunno, three games at once a couple of years ago. They all sounded terrible and we haven't posted about them (also because a bunch of them aren't on PC). AEW: Fight Forever, still officially Coming Soon, is their first crack at a sweaty graps sim to rival WWE's series, and today it was confirmed the publisher is THQ Nordic. This not only means that we'll see more gameplay at next week's THQ Nordic showcase, per a tiny teaser, but it adds another horse to the confusing carousel of companies that have worked on wrestling sims.

Bear with me here, but the WWE games used to be made by Yuke's, and were published by THQ until THQ liquidated in the 2010s. The WWE license passed to Take-Two Interactive and the games were published under 2K Sports, but still made by Yuke's until development was taken over by 2K's studio Visual Concepts from WWE 2K20 onwards.

This freed Yuke's up to become the developer of AEW: Fight Forever. Meanwhile, Nordic Games got hold of the THQ trademark (among other things) in THQ's great assets firesale, and thus started calling themselves THQ Nordic in 2016. To be clear, THQ Nordic are not the same as THQ, but it's interesting to see that AEW have almost sort of set themselves up with the original wrestledev team - or at least have the same logos, anyway.

A press release tells me that Kenny Omega, a man who has moves named after Final Fantasy characters, had an Undertale-themed promo, and once came to a match dressed as Sans, said “one of the first things I did after signing with AEW was to ask Tony Khan to let me help assemble the best gaming team on the planet, to make the best wrestling game ever.” The thing is, the most recent WWE games haven't set the world