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By Mark D, April 10, 2012 12:52 pm

Just a tad bit of background here, Andre The Giant was one of my favorite wrestlers when I was little. So this was something that interested me back in the day. I remember a friend telling me to watch WCW for “The Giant” because at the time WCW was promoting him as being Andre’s son without saying as much. But I was able to check online and find out in a few seconds that he wasn’t really related to Andre at all. Other then being a freakishly sized human being.

So in the late 90s WCW Vs The World came out, and me and my buddies grabbed it like all Wrestling games and played the hell out of it. I ended up playing it enough to unlock all the secret wrestlers, including one who was named “The Giant”. Of course he didn’t look anything like WCW’s The Giant unless he had grown a magical Afro at some point. Originally the game was released in Japan (without WCW wrestlers) and the wrestler was Andre The Giant. When it was imported they just called him The Giant and renamed a bunch of other Japaneses wrestlers due to copyright.

Now WCW made a mistake and switched game developers, getting picked up by EA. So the people who made WCW Vs The World were picked up by the WWF to start working on their video games. Which was pretty much a god send for the WWF games, considering Acclaim who were doing the WWF games continued to release the same game with minimal changes for the next 5 or 6 games. Have fun trying to pull off a Stone Cold Stunner when it requires you to hit 7 different buttons in a precise order. Mortal Kombat styled wrestling games were a brilliant idea.

So 2 or 3 games in, and they are working on the great No Mercy for the N64. Probably one of my all time favorite N64 games.  Well just about when the game was done with development, word came from the WWF that Big Show (aka The Giant in WCW) was demoted to the OVW roster. So they had to remove him from the game. Since it was so late in development, they just decided to turn Big Show into Andre The Giant. Thus the Andre/Big Show replacement came full circle. I don’t know why this amuses me, but it does.