Yuke’s interview: ‘Overcoming the WWE games will be a challenge… they’re getting really good’

When asked to think of modern wrestling video games, many players instantly think of Yuke’s.

The Osaka-based studio has been working on Japanese wrestling games since the mid ’90s, but became known to western grappling fans in 2000 with the release of WWF SmackDown on the PS1.

This would begin an 18-year run of games, during which the series’ name would change from WWF SmackDown to WWE SmackDown, to WWE SmackDown vs Raw, to simply WWE then WWE 2K.

In 2019, however, it was announced that Yuke’s would no longer be developing future games in the WWE 2K series, with California-based Visual Concepts taking over full development duties. The nearly 20-year partnership was over.

Keen to continue working on wrestling games, Yuke’s signed a deal with upstart promotion AEW, and last year released AEW: Fight Forever, a game developed with input from wrester Kenny Omega and developer Hideyuki Iwashita – the latter was director on WWF No Mercy, considered by many to be the greatest wrestling game ever.

While Fight Forever certainly didn’t become the No Mercy successor some had expected, it brought more arcade-focused wrestling gameplay to the table, providing a counterpoint to the increasingly realism-focused WWE 2K games.

It’s rare that Yuke’s gives interviews to the western media, so when VGC sat down with studio producer Takashi Takezawa we had a lot to ask him.

It was made clear fairly quickly that while some subjects were off the table – mainly regarding negotiations with AEW – others, such as the company’s history making WWE games, were surprisingly fine to discuss.

It’s been more than a year since AEW: Fight Forever was released. So far, how would you say it’s gone, in terms of hitting the levels of success you’d expected?

First of all, I should preface this by saying as a developer and not the publisher, there’s only so much I can say. I can’t really comment on sales figures, and can’t really comment on upcoming content because, again, that’s the job of the publisher.

I can speak to how we feel about the game, and having developed it and having had it released a year ago, we’re really proud of it. It’s a really solid work, and was fun to make.

We’re getting a lot of great feedback from fans. They’re letting us know how they feel about the game. A lot of positive feedback, which we love, and a lot of constructive feedback, which we also love, so we know what areas to focus on in the future.

“We’re getting a lot of great feedback from fans. They’re letting us know how they feel about the game. A lot of positive feedback, which we love, and a lot of constructive feedback, which we also love, so we know what areas to focus on in the future.”

Back in 2019 we interviewed Yuke’s COO Hiromi Furuta, and at the time Yuke’s was still working on WWE games. She told us then that Yuke’s was starting work on a new wrestling IP alongside its WWE games.

Obviously, a few months after that interview the WWE deal ended. I was wondering if the new IP wrestling game Yuke’s was working on was turned into Fight Forever once a deal was done with AEW?

Yeah, that’s another one that’s a little bit difficult to answer. I can say this – the way we work at Yuke’s, of course we’ve made a lot of wrestling games, so we have a lot of tools and engines that are built for us to build those kinds of games on. And as we build up our know-how , we constantly improve and refine these tools that have been used for subsequent games.

So I wouldn’t say that whatever that was potentially, at the time, necessarily is AEW Fight Forever, because we’re constantly iterating on these things.

Apologies in advance for mentioning WWE a lot, but it’s going to be difficult to have this conversation without doing so. When you were working on the WWE games, it was an annual thing, so every year you had to deliver a new game.

I got the feeling that, for the team, it may have been difficult to entirely revamp the game at any point, or completely change any aspects of it, because of the annual timeframe. On the other hand, the AEW game was an opportunity to essentially start from scratch. Was that a challenge, or liberating to have that extra time to wipe the slate clean, as it were?

I would say it was both challenging and liberating, and motivating for the team. And first of all, I should preface this by saying it’s no problem at all mentioning WWE. We’re fine to talk about that. We worked on those games for 20 years – it’s totally part of our history, so no worries there.

The way that those games were developed, yes of course, they did come out annually in the WWE franchise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it just took a year to make them, right? They were on an offset sort of schedule where the game you were seeing coming out one year had actually been worked on for three or four years previously. In a manner of speaking it was almost like dominoes going down.

So there wasn’t a huge difference necessarily in the development period, or necessarily our approach when we went to AEW: Fight Forever. I think the biggest difference, the biggest challenge and the biggest motivating, liberating factor was working directly with AEW and with Kenny Omega. Outside of the typical developer-publisher relationship, there was more involvement from those parties, which made it very different and refreshing.

Speaking of Kenny Omega, when he helped to announce the game in the first place, he stated at the time that he wanted it to be similar to something like WWF No Mercy. I wonder if the team at the time felt that was a big goal to reach?

Because when you’re talking about stuff like that, you’re talking about one of the greatest wrestling games ever made. Did the team think that was a huge challenge to meet, or an interesting goal to aim for? Because I wonder whether it’s a good or bad thing to aim for something that high.

So, the one thing I can say is we have great respect for WWF No Mercy. It’s an amazing game. It’s a classic. Knowing that Kenny’s favourite game was not a Yuke’s-developed wrestling game, as someone who’s been making them for 20 years, I’ll be honest, it was kind of a bummer. [laughs]

But it did also help us to set a high goal and really aim to do something special. And you know, just being able to be compared to something of that level, and then to aim for something like that, was a great honour for us and a great challenge.

It’s interesting because it’s almost bringing back the rivalry from those days. I’ve been playing wrestling games for longer than I care to remember, but back in that N64 and PlayStation era you had Yuke’s making SmackDown games and AKI making games like WWF WrestleMania 2000 and WWF No Mercy.

And it was great because it was almost a WWF vs WCW situation where fans took different sides. And I wonder if, at the time, it was encouraging for Yuke’s to try to outdo the ‘rival’ WWF game, and whether the AEW game brings back that feeling of competition?

Interesting question. I should say that in those days, I was just a programmer on those titles, so I was honestly so concerned with my day-to-day workload that it wasn’t really on my mind to think of that kind of rivalry, and I think the people working directly around me didn’t necessarily see it that way.

That doesn’t mean that the director or other folks may have indeed seen it as some kind of rivalry with that other series. I think in those days, I was personally much more concerned with user feedback and what the players were going to think.

The relationship with the user was definitely at the forefront of my mind, rather than the relationship to competitors. It’s not really the way that we looked at that back then.

How is it working with AEW? How hands-on are they in terms of the development side of things? Did they give a lot of feedback during the initial development, especially the wrestlers like Kenny Omega who obviously love wrestling games? Or were they hands-off enough to allow you to do what you know best without… ‘interfering’ is a strong word, so ‘collaborating too much’, let’s say.

It was very collaborative. We did get a lot of feedback from them. Of course, we had play sessions where we could have meetings and let them play the latest build and get feedback directly from them.

In one such meeting, Kenny Omega actually joined from the green room backstage after a big wrestling show – you could tell he was holding his phone and talking to us. And he was giving feedback on one of the animations in the game and he actually grabbed another wrestler that was nearby and was like “no, it’s not like this, you do it like this,” and started dragging the guy around the room. So we got, let’s say, very detailed feedback from him, for sure.

There have been quite a few DLC packs since the game was released. I’m not sure how much you can say about the process, but who decides which DLC will be created, and how far in advance is it decided?

For example, you’ve got someone like Adam Copeland, who joined in October 2023, and was made available as a DLC fighter by June. I was wondering whether it’s Yuke’s who approaches AEW and says “we want to put this wrestler in the game” or AEW who says to Yuke’s “we would like this person to be put in the game next”?

Apologies in advance, that’s another one that’s very hard to answer specifically. I can say that as the developers making the game, we certainly have ideas in our head of who we think would fit really well in the line-up, in terms of game balance and how they fit into the overall gameplay, and who would be easy to make fit into the game. We certainly have a wishlist of sorts.

Obviously though, the final say goes to the IP holder. AEW is going to have certain requests, and that goes for any IP holder, right? Whether it be WWE, AEW or anyone like that, there are times where we have to redo things.

You know, there could be times when we had started making one wrestler, had the model mostly created, spent some money, time and energy on it, and then got a request: “Hey, actually, this guy is up-and-coming, we need to put this guy in instead.” And we have to maintain that flexibility, to be able to do that and think on our feet.

And then of course, there are times where, you know, it’s a living IP and it’s ever-evolving and changing in real-time, right? So we’ll create a character and then they’ll have a heel turn, or a face turn, or a new costume, or something like that.

Players might see a character and ask “why is this guy wearing his old outfit? Why does he have his old affiliation?” That’s simply because we made him once before, and we had no time to keep up with the latest because it is, again, a very fast-moving IP.

Have you found that the turnaround is quicker with AEW, from the decision that a wrestler will be added to them appearing in the game, versus in the WWE days? Like you say, it’s always a necessary evil that wrestling games will always be out of date, but have you found that working with AEW has made the turnaround time quicker?

It’s not really much of a difference, I think, again, because it’s always dynamically changing. There’s a lot of last-minute things.

Even if we know that a new wrestler is up-and-coming, they might not have their costume designed until the very last second and we have to scramble. That honestly happens with any of these brands, just because of the nature of the business.

Here’s another one I imagine you won’t be able to answer, but let’s try. Like we say, the game is more than a year old now, and there continues to be more DLC added to the game. I know it’s called Fight Forever and I know that’s based on a chant, but is the actual plan to continue to update this game ‘forever’ and just make it the solitary AEW console game?

Obviously the way wrestling works is that it will become even more outdated over time – for example, you’ve got Cody Rhodes, CM Punk and Jade Cargill in there, and they’re all at WWE now. Will there become a point where the game is so outdated that you draw a line under it and release a second AEW game, or is the plan to continue to update this one title?

So again, of course, this is one we can’t answer directly. It’s definitely a question for AEW. The concept of the game, of course, is to make it last as long as possible right now – to keep updating. I think we’re sticking with that pretty well.

I think with any game, there are points that people are very satisfied with and points people want to improve in potential future iterations, so I think it’s natural to think about what may be in the future.

But that’s really more of a question for AEW. It’s an Omega decision, ultimately; he can probably answer that for you, and depending on what AEW wants to do – nobody knows for sure how Yukes’ involvement will pan out, you know. These kinds of relationships evolve and change over time as well.

We can say that as a development company, even though what Yuke’s does in the future may be a little unclear, I think the one thing that is very clear is that wrestling is part of our DNA and will continue to be a pillar of the company, so we’ll definitely keep making wrestling content in one form or another. But I certainly can’t talk specifics in terms of this series.

As well as the updated roster, the DLC has also added new modes over time, one of which was the 30-player online Stadium Stampede mode. I loved the idea but at the same time, it felt like by the time it came out the player base had dropped too much to get the most out of that 30-player capacity. It was nearly impossible to get a full 30-player match going.

I know hindsight is fantastic, but would it have been better to have this mode at launch? Or, given that the game had been delayed a few times before its release, was the decision made that it couldn’t be delayed even further to get Stadium Stampede in there on day one?

Yeah, that’s a hard one. That’s a hard one. Hindsight, of course, is always 20-20 and you can’t go back and change the past.

I will say this – the rules for that mode are kind of complicated, right? So there’s definitely an argument to be made that a game at launch should have a lower barrier of entry and a low hurdle for new players to jump in, so you don’t necessarily want to bloat it with complicated rule sets and modes. So there’s an argument to be made that that’s the sort of thing that should be added later.

But I also fully understand that when we’ve got this big 30-person mode, it would have been cool to have it out when there were more players engaged. That makes sense as well. But it’s… yeah, there’s no real right answer to something like that – it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t, so they say.

But we do think that was a cool mode and we wanted to create buzz with it, because there’s not a lot of fighting games out there with that many participants at once, so I’m glad we were able to have it.

“I also fully understand that when we’ve got this big 30-person mode, it would have been cool to have it out when there were more players engaged. That makes sense as well. But it’s… yeah, there’s no real right answer to something like that – it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t, so they say.”

Was there ever a consideration to take that mode, separate it from the game and make it free-to-play? I know it’s easy for me to say as someone not on the development side of things, but I wonder if that could have been a way to build the large player base that a mode like that needs, and maybe bring in some extra money too.

Yeah, that’s one I really can’t answer.

When the WWE deal ended and Visual Concepts fully took over, its first game WWE 2K20 wasn’t received very well, and was very buggy, to the extent that 2K cancelled 2K21 to give the team an extra year to fix the series’ issues.

I’d assume the team at Yuke’s were keeping an eye on this and were aware of it. Forgive how rude this question is, but I’ve always been curious to know, was the reaction “that’s a shame”, or “that proves how valuable we were”?

Yeah, I think for that – and I’m not just saying this – we weren’t happy that it happened. We don’t want to see misfortune befall anybody, we know how hard development can be.

And in fact, in this specific case, you know how I explained earlier the way we approached the series – that even though we were releasing titles on an annual basis, with the way teams were structured, some people were working on a game for two or three years, and it was kind of staggered?

So you might get a new game every year, but it doesn’t mean it was made entirely in one year by any stretch, right? But that team really did have to make a full game from scratch in one year.

So even from early on, we thought “man, that’s a really high hurdle for those guys”, that they had signed up for something really, really difficult.

So among developers, I think we tend to sympathise and empathise with one another. So yeah, that was a bummer for them. We felt their pain.

Conversely, then, are you happy that, even though it’s a rival series, it’s now reviewing well and back on form again? Because does that encourage you to raise your game?

You know, I haven’t really thought about it through that lens, but I can put it to you this way – the more wrestling games are out there, and the more teams working on wrestling games, the better it ultimately is for the wrestling game community, because you get more and more fans, and people get more and more excited about it.

So I think obviously overall it’s a very good thing to have lots of good wrestling games out there. And I think for us as well, we’ve worked on WWE games, we’ve worked on AEW games, we’ll continue to work on all sorts of wrestling content in the future as well. So I think having a big player base of wrestling fans is going to benefit us, and it’s going to benefit the community more broadly.

And, you know, having played the newest release and seen some of the cool new features and things like that, I think in terms of rivalry, it’s going to be a challenge to overcome those guys there – they’re getting really good.

“You know, having played the newest [WWE] release and seen some of the cool new features and things like that, I think in terms of rivalry, it’s going to be a challenge to overcome those guys there – they’re getting really good.”

AEW has a close connection with Japanese wrestling – particularly New Japan Pro Wrestling. While I appreciate this isn’t your decision to make, would you like the opportunity to add NJPW stars or other Japanese wrestlers to the game to help promote Japanese wrestling in the West?

Yeah, I think as developers… and, you know, we’re not just game makers. It goes without saying that among the team there’s a lot of pro wrestling fans – obviously we wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t love it.

And I think we, collectively as a team, [believe] the more fans that are out there, the better, and the more these kinds of ‘unknown’ wrestlers become more known globally, I think the better it is for the overall community.

We’d love to do what we can to spread that love around the world and in all directions.

I think with Japanese pro wrestling, in some ways, it feels like the world has shrunk a little bit, but there are so many indie divisions out there, with so many good wrestlers, with so much potential. It would be great if we could somehow get those names out there and get them some attention, because they deserve it.

Obviously Japanese pro wrestling has a different kind of flow, and a different pace to western wrestling. It almost feels like the audience is more respectful of the art of it, rather than the storyline.

I remember reading back in the day that while we were getting the WWF SmackDown games from Yuke’s in the West, in Japan you were making New Japan Pro Wrestling games and things like Wrestle Kingdom. Then over at AKI, while we were getting WWF No Mercy and the like, it was also making the Virtual Pro Wrestling series for Japan.

Then you had the likes of the Fire Pro series, and Giant Gram on the Dreamcast, and all these interesting-looking Japanese wrestling games, and I remember at the time thinking “I’d quite like to get the chance to play those, actually”.

Yeah, it’s interesting you say that, because I do think wrestling is different over here, and I think there’s definitely a desire on our part to kind of get more Japanese flavour into proceedings when we can.

You know, in AEW: Fight Forever we added DLC that included a wrestling ring in front of a Japanese Shinto shrine, and that’s kind of a long tradition – we sometimes have matches in front of temples and shrines and castles– that’s something that’s been popular in Japan.

So any chance we get to be able to kind of spread that culture a little bit in that Japanese pro wrestling style, we’re happy to do it.

I also note that something missing from the recent WWE games is the extreme silliness you used to put in there. You can see it in the AEW story mode, where you travel around the US and you have to collect all the selfies and eat the food in all the different restaurants. It’s silly and totally unrelated to wrestling, but it has that distinct ‘Yuke’s’ character to it.

There was a lot of that in the story modes in the older WWE games that Yuke’s made – they had a sillier edge to them. I always appreciated it when zombies would appear in one game, or in another game you could befriend then fight as a US soldier for no reason at all.

I see you also added a haunted house arena to AEW: Fight Forever, so I appreciate the decision to go very silly sometimes and not take things too seriously.

Thank you for that. There’s a lot of reasons we do stuff like that. It widens the fun a little bit, and gets more users interested when there’s weird stuff in the game.

Frankly, it also makes it very easy to differentiate year from year, what kind of new and interesting things are in there. So there are a lot of reasons we do that. I think adding weird stuff for a layer of fun is definitely worthwhile.

And this time, especially, Kenny Omega was involved in the creation of the story mode you referenced. It was his idea to have this sort of thing happen, and his ideas combined with our know-how and experience gave you that mode you like. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Finally, AEW fans and wrestling fans in general are a hardcore following, and a dedicated bunch. The fans in the West don’t often get to communicate with you, so do you have a message for them about the future of the series?

I think my message to the fans would be to remind them that there are lots of ways to enjoy this game. Lots of ways to have fun.

I think on the surface it’s a very simple game. It’s arcade style, and it harkens back to No Mercy as well. We want it to be simple and easy to get into. But I think the more you play it yourself and with friends, the more layers you uncover.

So I think, if anything, it’s a request to the fans – please enjoy the game, uncover those layers, find your own way of enjoying the game – your own way of having fun.

Show your friends, share with your friends how you’re having fun, learn from them and how they’re having fun, and just keep uncovering those hidden layers of depth in there – because we made it for you.