VGCW: A Retrospective, by Bazza
My name is Bazza and for the past 3 years I have been streaming a weekly show on Twitch. That show is called Video Game Championship Wrestling or VGCW for short.
Don’t miss out on Bazza’s last VGCW show taking place June 9th at 11PM UK/6PM ET at Twitch.TV/bazza87. And don’t fret wrestling fans, VGCW will continue on under new management!
VGCW takes both famous and obscure video game characters from various different games and throws them all into a wrestling ring together as the A.I. takes control of them while they fight for our amusement. Just like “real” wrestling, the characters have the opportunity to fight over various championship belts and other titles. There are also multiple storylines and feuds going on between the characters which brings a huge amount of personality and life to the VGCW universe. Because of the nature of this show, VGCW is able to have completely off the wall storylines which wouldn’t be possible in a real wrestling promotion, such as stories involving stopping an evil antagonist from taking over the world or even a story involving time travel.
Due to the cross over nature of the show, we have seen characters form friendships with each other the likes of that we never thought we would see. Captain Falcon from F-Zero and Ezio from the Assassin’s Creed series have formed a tag team together, and Dan Hibiki from the Street Fighter series has formed a team with Billy & Jimmy Lee from the Double Dragon series, which has become one of the most popular teams in the show’s entire history. We also see rivalries that we never thought we would see, such as Guile from Street Fighter feuding with Duke Nukem, or Phoenix Wright being bitter enemies with Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid.
The fights in VGCW can be surprisingly enjoyable to watch. There have been many matches that are still spoken about to this day, such as Scorpion from Mortal Kombat VS Pokémon Trainer Red, which was a 30 minute long match in which they both had to get as many pinfalls as possible within the time limit. At the time, the match was considered a dream match as both competitors were considered on the same skill level and astonishingly, the outcome of that match was a tie at 5–5.
The viewers add an amazing experience when watching the show live. Just like being in an arena packed full of thousands of screaming fans, the Twitch chat room in the VGCW channel is fulled with people cheering their favourites on, booing the characters they dislike, yelling in amazement when something cool happens, or joining in on various in-community jokes such as specific chants when certain wrestlers appear on screen, such as chanting “Hey!” when Barret Wallace from Final Fantasy VI makes his way to the ring. Nothing beats the surprise of hearing the sound clip yell out “Here comes a new challenger!” and then watching the chat explode into fits of excitement and anticipation over who this new comer joining the show could be. Then after the show it’s off to the VGCW forums where fans get into discussions about what they saw, what they want to see next, what they theorise will happen next in the story and everything inbetween.
VGCW is a very community driven show, almost all of the characters seen in VGCW have been created by fans of the show and then uploaded onto the WWE’2K14 servers for me to download and use in my show. Without the amazing support from the fans, VGCW would not have looked and felt as amazing as it does. I owe a lot of the success of the show to the amazing community support I have received over the years.
For almost 3 years I’ve had the pleasure of streaming my show with thousands of fans and sharing all the amazing moments. But due to me pursuing other things, the episode of VGCW that will take place on June 9th at 11PM UK/6PM EST over at Twitch.TV/bazza87 will be my final episode. The name of that show will be “VGCW: End Game X” and all of the feuds from that season will come to an end as the characters in the show will finally get to fight that one person they’ve been wanting to get their hands on for months.
VGCW End Game X on June 9th will have the following matches:
Sabin Rene Figaro VS Dan Hibiki VS Guile for the VGCW Championship
Groose VS Kefka for the VGCW Casual Championship
Dr. Eggman & Dr. Wily VS Billy & Jimmy Lee for the VGCW Co-Op Championship
Scorpion VS Ganondorf
Illidan Stormrage VS Senator Steven Armstrong 30 Minute Iron Man Match
Donkey Kong, Bowser and Zangief VS Professor Layton, Zubaz and Toad
Toejam & Earl and Kanji VS Duke Nukem, Solid Snake and a Mystery Patrner
As this will be the final episode of VGCW before I hand the show over to new management, I have packed in a lot of matches into the show and it will run for approximately 3+ hours.
An average episode of VGCW can take me around 5 or 6 hours to create. As for my final episode, I usually go more cinematic for the season finales and so far I have clocked in around 28 hours creating this episode and I am still not even finished yet. This includes using WWE2K14’s in-game Story Creator tool to queue up the matches and story segments, video editing, audio editing, image editing, testing matches to make sure I have not made a mistake, and dealing with the multiple freezes and crashes that comes with using WWE2K14. I will have to refer to my notes to see what is the next part in the storyline and since the matches are A.I. VS A.I., even I don’t know what the outcome of a match will be so I will have to go back and double check the outcome of the matches in the previous episode so I can write the dialogue accordingly. There is also checking the community opinions to see who people like and dislike so I can use that to my advantage. For example a lot of people disliked the character Zangief despite him being one of my personal favourites, so I turned Zangief into a cocky heel who talks about how much of a favourite he is despite him acting like a jerk to everyone.
VGCW has been an extremely enjoyable experience for me and I am so glad that I have been able to entertain such a large amount of people over the past 3 years. I am truly going to miss being able to put on a show every week and if you have been a loyal viewer over the years then I would like to thank you for sharing your time with me. If you have never seen VGCW, I urge you to give It a try and watch my final episode, VGCW: End Game X on June 9th over at Twitch.TV/bazza87 at 11PM UK/6PM ET.