Eric Bischoff Explains Why WCW Removed Focus From WarGames

The War Games Match was synonymous with World Championship Wrestling and its legacy. A match that was created by Dusty Rhodes in 1987 was a staple of the WWF alternative for years, but by 1999, the match type had seemingly lost its way and wasn’t utilized at all.

On his podcast, former WCW President, Eric Bischoff opened up as to why he ultimately downplayed the War Games Match over the years to its inevitable absence from the 1999 Fall Brawl pay-per-view where the match was typically held. to Eric, the September pay-per-view event and the gimmick match associated with it just didn’t resonate enough to warrant being a tent-pole event for World Championship Wrestling.

“I know we needed really well-defined tent-pole events, Halloween Havoc was one [in] October. Starrcade, just a few months later in December,” Bischoff began. “If you try to make every event you do a tent-pole event, meaning a very big meaningful event, then none of them really are, if that makes sense. Look, WrestleMania is the tent pole of all tent-pole events. That’s what makes the world go round. People start talking about next year’s WrestleMania before this one’s over with. [It’s taken thirty-five years] to get there. Royal Rumble, very similar. There’s a couple of big tent-pole events that support everything else underneath it. And to me, War Games just wasn’t a tent-pole event. It wasn’t the one or one of the ones that I felt had enough of a personality and could be consistently created to help support and be a major pay-per-view event when it was in such close proximity to Halloween Havoc and to Starrcade. That’s the answer.”

Of course, the War Games Match would resurface in Major League Wrestling in the early 2000s, and ultimately make its return on a larger scale in NXT.

Now, the match is a tent-pole event for the underground WWE brand, with the tradition of NXT TakeOver: WarGames every November. 

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