New details on the Wrestlemania Showcase mode in WWE 2K24.
This year's WrestleMania will be Wrestlemania 40 and to celebrate, WWE's annual video game release WWE 2K24 will be centered around 40 Years of Wrestlemania. This will be highlighted by a Showcase of the Immortals mode which will be this year's interpretation of the annual 2K Showcase.
Ten years ago, 2K Games' inaugural outing with WWE saw a "30 Years of WrestleMania" mode included in WWE 2K14. This year's showcase will be different in many ways which was discussed by WWE 2K gameplay producer Bryan Williams during a recent Q&A session with WCCFTech.
Williams reveals that there will only be 21 matches from past WrestleMania that will be playable and due to the explosion of women's wrestling in the past decade, there will be much more representation from women Superstars.
"There are 21 matches from the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, 2010s, up to the 2020s... the current day. So we have a wide selection, every era is represented. I will say one of the cool things about this year for Showcase of the Immortals is that there's a lot more female representation than there was ten years ago when 2K14 hit the shelves. So very excited and happy about that. In the demo, we're showing at this event today, one of the matches there is Rhea Ripley and Charlotte Flair from WrestleMania 39. So that is one of the matches that players will be able to experience in this year's Showcase."
Williams also says that they were very careful not to have too much overlap between the two modes, but there are some matches, such as Hulk Hogan's iconic clash with Andre the Giant from WrestleMania 3 in 1987, that are too important to the history of WrestleMania not to include in the mode.
"40 years of WrestleMania. Yes, it is a lot to wade through. I mean, 40 years of the biggest event in WWE history," said Williams. "You know, the one good thing is that because there's so much to pull from, it makes it easy as far as definitely wanting to do this match, but then having to whittle that down into a manageable number of matches is the other [issue]. But there were a couple things that went into this selection -- one of them was the fact that ten years ago, in 2014, we did 30 Years of WrestleMania. So this is like almost a sequel of sorts to one of our previous [Showcases] that was also received very, very well, and so one of the things that I know the Showcase designer, Dino Zucconi, was very mindful of was not wanting to redo a lot of matches that we did previously, which was good, as having ten years in between gave us that much more wealth of content. At the same time, there are just some matches in WrestleMania history that are so iconic that, you know, to do a mode without them would be a disservice to the fans and the brand that is WrestleMania.
"So that's part 1, and part 2 is obviously, are we able to get the rights to the wrestlers? That's another part of it as well," he continued. "We use that to kind of come up with our list of matches that we think, one, fully encompass and represent the gravitas of what this event is, and two, provides enough matches as far as content to make sure that we're giving the fans a full meal and not a snack. I think with this year's Showcase of the Immortals we've achieved just that. I'm excited for the fans to get their hands on it."
One wrestler who was featured on the cover of the special 40 Years of WrestleMania edition of the game until recently is Brock Lesnar. Fans can learn about his subsequent removal from the cover at this link.
WWE 2 24 will be available for players worldwide across all PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms on March 8. Those who pre-order deluxe editions of the game can play on March 5.
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