12/28/2025

© WWE

Is This How To Do War Games?

by Peter Edge

WAR GAMES!!!!

No, it isn’t something Pete Hegseth shouts at himself every morning in the mirror before heading to work but one of the more historic gimmick matches in wrestling history.

In the month of November, we managed to see the Big 2 promotions in North American wrestling put on what the college football announcer Mark Jones called a “two ring cage match” during a “Survivor Series” ad read while covering the Oklahoma vs LSU College Football game, a part ESPN’s blitz of telling anyone who’d listen that a WWE show was on the ESPN app that day.

On those two nights we saw the philosophy of both AEW and WWE come to the forefront, with AEW’s “Blood and Guts” doing exactly what it says on the tin and WWE, while seeing two of the Men’s War Games combatants run the blade, executing what was one of the grittier match types in pro wrestling and Disney-fying it up.

So, how did we get to two November nights where All Elite and the Fed put on a night dominated by two rings and a cage?

Invented by Dusty Rhodes, the match didn’t make PPV until 1989 with a 5 vs 5 format that saw 20% of the combatants making their only appearance in a War Games match at the “Great American Bash” in 1989. It wasn’t even the main event, with the hot feud of Ric Flair vs Terry Funk taking the honours of finishing the show. The Midnight Express/Road Warriors/Steve Williams vs Fabulous Freebirds/Samoan SWAT Team is good but it doesn’t feel like War Games, mainly because The Four Horsemen aren’t involved.

The Horsemen were WCW’s lead faction through its days of its predecessor, Jim Crockett Promotions, and during the 12 years it was under the ownership of Time Warner Media. The group led by Ric Flair would face off against the chief protagonists of what was then JCP in early War Games.

War Games was solely a house show attraction at the start, being the headline match on shows of the Great American Tours of 1987 and 1988. In all, the Horsemen vs a team led by Dusty Rhodes made up 11 of the 14 matches that were headlining these special house shows during the summer of ‘87 and ’88. In fact, in its history, War Games under its IP name is very closely associated with a select number of PPV names: “Great American Bash”, “Wrestle War”, “Fall Brawl” and “Survivor Series”.

It’s really during the second of the above four that War Games has its most adoration by fans. While the matches that are available on tape from WCW are very good (until 1998), there isn’t the oomph to these matches that you get in 1991 and 1992.

I’m someone that believes that wrestling has to evolve – like the NFL has, and soccer, too. As much as I can switch on a match from a generation ago and enjoy it, I also see modern wrestling and can marvel at it. But there is something about War Games in 1991 and 1992 that should be studied and learnt from, and there’s things from modern day War Games that have completely missed the assignment.

Many factors play into this. In WWE, until this year, it was the aim to please the sponsors and have no blood on their shows. In fact, it was Vince McMahon’s intention to dismiss AEW’s alternative outlook and its willingness to have blood on its show by using the term “Blood and Guts” that gave birth to the name of what AEW, through Cody Rhodes at first, dreamt up of their version of War Games (it’s as ironic as rain on your wedding day that Cody never got to take part in the AEW variant of a War Games match despite being the first guy on AEW programming to mention The Match Beyond).

When watching the 1991 and 1992 matches, you can see the difference from what WCW were serving with Sting as the company’s main character and as the star of these matches and what we see today from what the Big Two have put on in their take of War Games.

One misconception with the old school War Games is that they were the end of the road of the rivalries ongoing at the time. The end of the 1991 War Games match saw El Gigante save his little buddy Brian Pillman and submit for Pillman after the powerbomb he suffered at the hands of Sid, who justified his “Best Worst Wrestler” tag with the greatest miscalculation of space since Apollo 13.

The 1992 War Games (which, like 1991, took place at “Wrestle War”) saw the beginning of the end for the top heel group in WCW, The Dangerous Alliance, a replacement for The Four Horsemen post-Ric Flair’s departure to WWF. Being Pedantic Pete, I have to say that it really didn’t end the feud between WCW’s babyfaces and Paul E. Dangerously’s squad with conflicts between the groups continuing for the rest of the era of Kip Fyre, the President of WCW, until Bill Watts took the reins at corporate level and Paul Heyman left shortly after (because he was caught in the act of doing a fraud with WCW’s policy of free plane tickets), with Michael Hayes taking the mantle of group leader, which didn’t last long.

The things you easily noticed with the ‘91 and ‘92 War Games are hot crowds, hot announcers and wrestlers using their gifts to their advantage. Without wanting to sound like a “it was better in the old days” wanker, the brawling wasn’t dictated by shortcuts and plunder, but with fists. The quality of the brawling was so good that it was all they needed to get the fans in attendance entranced.

Fans who are of a younger age than me probably know Jim Ross as that man who turns up on AEW PPV’s for a couple of matches and being a dirty old man on twitter, but prime Jim Ross is just fantastic and when I mean prime Jim Ross I’m not talking about Attitude Era J.R but the Jim Ross from 1989-1993.

His enthusiasm when the babyfaces even the odds matched the fans erupting every time a new man from Sting’s Dudes With Attitude came into the cage. It added to the occasion and the brutality; and even though in 1992 he was impaired by Jesse Ventura and a chemistry between the pair that was worse than Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in Jurassic World, Ross was the perfect soundtrack to the best War Games in history according to many people (including me).

If the 1991 War Games match threatens to hit five stars but can’t quite get there, the 1992 iteration camps itself in the 5 star range from second one.

I joked on a group chat that everyone who took part in the first women’s “Blood and Guts” should have been forced to watch the 1992 War Games match Clockwork Orange style (yes I know that isn’t appropriate), but when you watch this match it is the perfect example of how to do War Games. The fans helped this match a lot. Every strike from the faces gets a boom, moments of the heels getting something to them that they deserve is cheered loudly. The crowd is alive to the point when Arn Anderson comes in and hits his signature moves, its akin to the away team scoring, which silences the crowd, but the reason the volume is deafening, as Ross says on commentary, is how good everyone is in this match. There is no dead time, there is no wasted motion and they earn every pop.

From the 1993 War Games match onwards, it didn’t feel the same. Even the 1996 and 1997 versions in the midst of the legendary WCW vs NWO feud, while getting the basics right in the match structure don’t have anywhere near the intensity of the previous matches even going back to the “Great American Bash” tour matches. By the time September of 1998 came by, the feeling from WCW bigwigs was that War Games needed reimagining, but the rebrand of the match – a three team contest with the now NWO splinter packs of Wolfpac and Hollywood and a Team WCW – was so bad that it was over for the War Games that was such a staple of WCW’s history.

Vince Russo tried to bring it back in his reign of error as the chief creative force of WCW but with a 2000 rebrand. Now a multi-man singles match contested in a Triple Cage structure (which was taken from WCW’s attempt to get major mainstream vibes from the Ready to Rumble movie, but actually was something that surely broke the Geneva Convention when the finished product came out), with the winner decided by who would take the WCW World Title climb down the 3 levels and leave the structure through the ground level door with the Big Gold belt, it is a match so awful that in the WWE DVD that compiles every War Games in WCW that had been recorded, Dusty as the main talking head in between matches disowns the match viscerally. The section of the match between the Harris Twins and Kronik and their brawling is so horrific that it makes the demise of WCW a worthwhile exercise.

Because Vince McMahon is a moron, he never brought back the War Games brand in his time in charge during the two decades between the end of WCW and his unceremonious departure from wrestling after it was discovered that he’s a massive piece of shit who sexually assaulted women (who knew?), despite Triple H asking to do such a match and running a version of them in NXT. But while the Fed were adverse to such a concept, companies all over America would attempt their takes on War Games to varying amounts of success.

The best version of War Games from this period was the ROH vs CZW Cage of Death match with the two prominent Philadelphia promotions battling it out at the end of an inter-promotional feud. The whole thing on paper feels like, to quote Phil Schneider’s Way of the Blade, “…(a) match layout (that) reads like toxic Vince Russo-ism,” with an insider reference of JJ Dillon, the Horsemen manager and fall guy in those “Great American Bash” tour matches winning the coin toss for the ROH team, an in-match heel turn, partners that can’t get along, a rule change and a post-match heel turn – but all those make the match somehow.

The babyfaces having the advantage is not how you do War Games. The essence of the vintage War Games matches is the heels being in control and the babyfaces evening the odds which gets fans excited. It’s simple maths but the change-up somehow works here in no small part because a portion of the crowd at the ROH event are CZW fans. It led to an atmosphere akin to football matches in Europe, and especially in the Premier League in England, with the “away fans” matching the noise of Ring of Honor fans of what was a tribalistic divide at the time in indy wrestling fandom in the City of Brotherly Love.

The heel turn of Bryan Danielson against Samoa Joe halfway through the match makes the advantage disappear and when Homicide gets into the match to save the day for an overmatched ROH team, it gets a huge pop and Homicide’s performance – as he hits anyone that is CZW allegiant with a fork – is excellent, with the moment that Chris Hero gets hit being a moment of catharsis as he gets his just deserts in a match where he’s the most hateable dickhead.

While the threat of Russo-ism didn’t materialise in the Cage of Death, TNA – with heavy doses of Russo’s vision of wrestling – would put on Lethal Lockdown and none of the matches in the six sides of steel or the “Lockdown” PPV ever touched any of the vintage War Games matches.

With these matches all taking place in a single ring with 8/10 people being a crowd on these nights and the over reliance on weapons, they were fine matches that never really lived in the imagination.

NWA: Anarchy, a group out of the state of Georgia, would put on a War Games match regularly with a 2006 match that saw a group called The Devil’s Rejects face a group defending Anarchy with the ownership of the company on the line. In a single ring, the match doesn’t feel as cramped as the TNA Lethal Lockdown contests mainly because this match is better laid out than the Lockdown matches; and despite the production being so indie that I was expecting a 500 miles car race to take place on the outside circling the ring, with the match looking like it’s filmed on a potato and the sound of the commentary being so unlevel that it almost burst my neighbours hi-fi system, the passion on show really brings the match to the core and is a really enjoyable offering.

But as the companies that were keeping the War Games legacy alive were either losing their popularity, becoming irrelevant or going out of business, War Games was losing its ammunition on the wrestling landscape. That is, until Triple H got his way in NXT, a product of the Performance Center that he was in charge of, and War Games escaped from mainstream wrestling hibernation.

The first War Games was either a soft launch or Paul Levesque for some reason taking on the ethos of the last couple of War Games matches in WCW, with The Undisputed Era trio of Adam Cole, Bobby Fish and Kyle O’Reilly facing Sanity (Eric Young, Killian Dain and Alexander Wolfe), Authors of Pain and Roderick Strong. With the roof taken off to give wrestlers the chance of doing high spots off the top of the cage (because Gen X) and pinfalls now a way to win, the reimagining of War Games was good but overrated.

Future incarnations of the match went back to two teams of four or five and saw a women’s War Games match enter the fray, which did see the memorable Dakota Kai heel turn on Tegan Nox. (Maybe Kai just dislikes the idea of people refusing to lose in three minutes?)

The Undisputed Era became the new Horsemen, with the four (once Roddy Strong joined the faction) being in the first four men’s War Games in NXT until 2020, with the final one seeing UE in the babyface column facing Pat McAfee leading Team Britain against NXT’s top faction (I mean, the only thing Pat is actually good at is kicking an oval shaped ball so it does track).

When Triple H was given the pencil after Vince McMahon’s first departure from WWE, War Games became a part of the WWE calendar being associated with “Survivor Series” with the first men’s match as part of the Bloodline saga, but it was a women’s iteration of the match that was the first to appear on a WWE main roster show with Bianca Belair, Asuka, Alexa Bliss, Mia Yim and Becky Lynch beating Bayley, Dakota Kai, Iyo SKY, Nikki Cross and Rhea Ripley in a 3.25 star match.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that WWE put War Games on their television production as a reaction to AEW’s debut of Blood and Guts, their take on War Games. But looking at the evidence, this was obviously Paul Levesque, a man who campaigned to have a War Games match during the Evolution days of the company and made the match type an NXT staple in his days of booking the PC brand of WWE, indulging in a passion project. But just like me and soccer, just because you like it doesn’t mean you’re actually any good at the execution.

© WWE

The first AEW Blood and Guts should have been on March 25th, 2020, but by then the COVID-19 pandemic had caused wrestling to go to an empty arena format so The Elite vs The Inner Circle in the double ring cage was postponed and its replacement two months later would be the unforgettable and awesome Stadium Stampede match.

B&G would finally make it to “Dynamite” in June 2022, with the Inner Circle vs Pinnacle match; and while good, the end left a lot to be desired with that Jericho bump, but also underrated in its badness was the “submit or I throw Jericho off the cage” finish, a finish so bad in the War Games 1997, with the NWO threatening to slam the door onto Ric Flair’s head unless the Horsemen submitted for him, that it killed the town of Greensboro as a place to draw for the rest of WCW’s existence and was an underrated part of the death of WCW.

AEW’s batting average when it comes to Blood and Guts is really good. Every match since the IC/Pinnacle contest has hit north of 4 stars, but with the finish of the matches in its history being more balls than strikes, and only the 2022 finish of Blackpool Combat Club vs J.A.S. and the 2025 men’s match being ones that hit their mark, it does give credence to what was inserted into the WWE version of the match on its return. While pinfalls being a thing in Fed-land’s War Games is like adding stages to a NASCAR race, in the case of WWE it has worked.

The WWE style puts more emphasis on the drama of the pinfall than the submission and as we’ve learnt in the last fortnight, the cardinal sin in WWE world is submitting, so in order for heels to win the 1-2-3 is more palatable than tapping out. In AEW, the two times the heel team took the honours it was after someone submitted on the babyface team on their teammates’ behalf. A lot of that booking is down to the education of fans who have been taught to believe that tapping out is quitting, compared to the belief in the sport that tapping out came from (MMA), which is that you’re in a position you can’t get out of and you have no options left.

Hang on, did I just give Paul Levesque credit? I need to take a cold shower.

Even with the rule change, it doesn’t change the fact that the WWE version of these matches aren’t good at all. Likely, this is due to the quality of workers (born from a system where the drama of the near-fall is preached) struggling with the format of a match in which pinfalls can’t happen for 29 minutes or so. It isn’t a coincidence one of the sole highlights of the four years so far of War Games on the WWE main roster is Iyo Sky (albeit with some experience of being in the NXT War Games matches), who just happens to be the one of the great women’s workers of the last decade in both Japan and the United States.

These matches also aren’t helped by a live audience who have been trained in expecting big moments and near-falls in matches, which are not happening in that first half hour. Take the first two “Survivor Series” War Games matches in 2022 and 2023 and the fans being more interested in a table than any of the 10 women in the first match on the card of both events. For a match that is defined by violence, the violence in WWE’s War Games feels very WWE, sanitised and PG-13.

© AEW

AEW’s violence is quite the opposite. Within a couple of minutes of their first women’s Blood and Gut match, Skye Blue had so much blood on her face that the Muta scale was threatening to go above 10. Despite a reliance on plunder that we see in the women’s War Games in WWE, the match before it went “Beyond” flowed better than any of the women’s matches at the Death Star promotion and filled its time better than the men later in the night.

But it’s still not like the old War Games from the early 90’s.

Again, without wanting to sound like one of those “it was better in my day” weirdos, War Games matches in the early 90’s are just better. It’s absolutely personal love of the 1992 War Games match that dictates this opinion. When I was learning about the history of this industry, I heard about this match and how beloved it was, so I ordered the VHS of “WrestleWar” 1992 on eBay. When I bought my 42 inch 4K TV (that’s a “look at me” moment isn’t it), the first thing I watched on the WWE Network on this big boy TV was Sting’s Squadron vs Dangerous Alliance. On the final day that the Network was a thing, I spent half an hour of my New Year’s Eve watching War Games 1992 with the belief that I’d never see it again unless I bought the War Games DVD, which would be pointless because of a lack of DVD player in the Edge household. Of course it ended up on the WCW YouTube channel and yes, I’ve watched the match twice already this year.

But when watching the War Games matches from the early 90’s and current Blood and Guts/War Games, the differences are striking. Some of them are mentioned above (over-reliance on weapons, finishes being weak and difficult to book for heel wins in this type of match), but there are plenty of aesthetic differences in 2025 that are inferior to 1992.

The wrestlers being at ringside in the WCW version makes a ton of difference to the dynamic of the match. Moments like in ‘92 where the referee is having to restrain Ricky Steamboat from entering too early as the countdown from 10 starts and the energy from that feeds into his moment to shine. Every hit on an opponent sends fans crazy, even JR lets out a “oh yeah” at one point. WWE liked to put the teams of 4/5 into shark cages and have them enter from them but have them walk down the entrance to their entrance music. AEW has wrestlers come from the entrance way to enter the match. Today, the entrance is just as important as the action in a number of fans’ eyes.

The women’s side of the roster of both AEW and WWE having a chance to shine in this kind of match is awesome as someone who is an advocate for the women’s game, but it has led to a booking trope that simply doesn’t work. For some reason, the creative forces in charge think that having the heels have the advantage would make no sense, not realising that the face team having the advantage makes even less sense and disrupts the flow of the match, and it also means you have to compensate to make the flow of the match work.

The way it’s decided who gets the advantage has been by having a match between representatives from both teams, with the winner getting the person advantage being a new phenomenon, with TNA being the first company to have a “playoff” to decide whose team would come in first (thanks, Vince Russo). This has negated the years long tradition of the heels winning the coin toss because apparently heels winning coin tosses doesn’t get heel heat. Tell that to this England cricket fan every time the Australians win the toss and bat first.

The biggest difference between the War Games of old and the current War Games is the length of matches. In the WCW era, not one match went over 25 minutes. From time cues being shaved as aggressively as a visit to a Turkish barber to maybe the belief from those laying out these matches that anything more than 25 wasn’t going to work for this audience, the Match Beyond would finish quickly, with these segments going from 4 to 8 minutes. In comparison, WWE’s Match Beyonds go around a dozen minutes at max. AEW’s? Well there have been times where it goes longer than the intervals section of the match.

Two matches have gone 50+ minutes (is it a coincidence that both of those matches involved a heel Jon Moxley group?); and while really really good matches, the 2023 and 2025 men’s Blood and Guts did outstay their welcome once they crossed the forty minute mark.

Perhaps it’s because everyone involved wants to go epic for such a big occasion but not realising that getting to bed at midnight instead of 4am is vastly underrated or perhaps it’s thinking that the average fan wants the epic in line with how movie blockbusters go in 2025. However, just because a movie goes more than 2 hrs doesn’t mean it’s good (yes, I’m looking at you, Age of Ultron), and while the 2023 and 2025 men’s B&G contests were ****¼ in my Book of Ratings, while I don’t think about how they could have been better as much as I think about The Roman Empire, having watched a lot of these matches back for this retrospective I do wonder what I could have done with the time that could have been cut had they all gone 40ish minutes (actually the answer to that is nothing, because I have no social life and I hate people).

As someone that is fond of this type of match, it’s good to see it make a revival in the wrestling bubble having been so in love with prime War Games and it’s even better that it draws with AEW audiences (not WWE ones it seems, but that’s because WWE fans are the type of people that eat egg and chips when on holiday in Spain), with the Blood and Guts episodes always popping a number and doing good business at the box office. But to this War Games elitist, nothing will top those War Games matches of the late 80s and the early 90s and I urge you guys to seek them out to see how you really do War Games.

Asia & Oceania

While OZAWA returned to NOAH, we have previews for every notable promotion’s Wrestle Kingdom Week shows

CMLL

Dios De Los Muertos at Sold Out Arena Mexico Turns Into A Nightmare