Exploring Capcom's Saturday Night Slam Masters: A Forgotten Classic

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Watch your step, for you’ve just entered the Graveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history. The early '90s were a spectacular era for Capcom, a time marked by innovation and creativity in the gaming landscape. With titles like Street Fighter II taking center stage, Capcom proved itself as a powerhouse in both arcade and console gaming. Their unique blend of gameplay mechanics and character design set a standard that many would aspire to follow, even 25 years later.

Amidst the rise of fighting games, Saturday Night Slam Masters emerged as a unique blend of pro wrestling and fighting mechanics. Utilizing the CPS2 arcade technology, this game combined the excitement of wrestling with the visceral action reminiscent of Street Fighter. Unlike many other wrestling games that relied on repetitive character models and movesets, Slam Masters introduced characters with distinct fighting styles and animations, each contributing to a dynamic gaming experience.

As we delve deeper into the legacy of Capcom’s Saturday Night Slam Masters, it becomes clear that this game not only captured the essence of wrestling but also showcased the studio’s commitment to innovation. With characters like Biff and Gunloc—akin to Ryu and Ken in their unique movesets—players were treated to a rich variety of gameplay options. This level of detail and creativity set the game apart from its contemporaries, ensuring its place in the hearts of gamers.

What You Will Learn

The evolution of wrestling games in the early '90s and Capcom's impact.
Distinctive character designs and their influence on gameplay.
The unique mechanics of Saturday Night Slam Masters compared to other titles.
The game's sound design and its role in creating an immersive experience.
The absence of re-releases and the hope for future accessibility.

At that time, especially on the SNES, you just had cut and paste wrestlers with different models but the same movesets -- so every match felt the same. With Slam Masters, you have high flyers like Oni and Stingray with the former being a mix of a kabuki facemask a la Akira Hokuto and the latter being a high-flying small luchador very much like Rey Mysterio Jr., who even in the early '90s was making waves with his work in Mexico. Character size was different as well -- so having him battle Titanic Tim felt like a David vs. Goliath battle because it was. Much like a brawler, the tiny character can hit and move, but the larger character deals out more damage per shot.

The feel of Saturday Night Slam Masters was the most refined of any arcade wrestling game -- including Wrestlefest. While that was about as perfect a WWF game as existed at the time, this game set out to replicate a wide array of wrestling styles within an arcade game's framework. That meant having to create something where you could have satisfying high-flying matches alongside back and forth battles with all-around wrestlers, or big guys just beating the tar out of each other like Stan Hansen and Vader did in New Japan. For the most part, the game succeeded in doing that, and benefited from a variety of wrestlers and game modes.

You have single and tag matches to enjoy, with the latter being tornado matches with elimination rules -- which can itself be thrilling. Singles matches allow the core gameplay to shine and enable you to have more arena-based brawling, while team-based affairs are more thrilling. I love having singles matches where in one match, you can have Biff battle Tim and dive on the floor with a suicide dive on one side, send him down to the foreground for a plancha, and then hit him with a chair, buckle or table to deal out extra damage. You can either take him down for a while and stun him or maybe even win by countout by taking him down at the right time. There's a lot of diversity in weapon usage and unlike any game since you can even jump up and throw weapons at enemies to take them out from afar -- adding a makeshift projectile element to something that otherwise works as a slightly outworldly pro wrestling game.

Outside of the supernatural Scorpion character with lightning covering his body for things like a Tiger driver, every character and move in the game could to some degree happen in a real pro wrestling match. In seeing some of the flying attacks featured with modern eyes, some of the stuff Stingray does wouldn't be all that out of place in a Rey Fenix match now. While Alexander the Grater wears his Vader influences on his sleeve, it's fun to play matches with him as a Vader surrogate and using Gunlock as a Sting stand-in to replicate the feel of their WCW battles from the early '90s where you've got this great all-around athlete around this ass-kicking beast of a man and you have to use intelligence to fight from underneath to win as Gunloc or fall to Grater's long-range hard-hitting punches and violent powerbombs and backbreakers.