March 28, 2024

MDickie Builds Wrestling Video Game Empire

The indie video game developer opens up like never before.

For independent video game developer Mat Dickie, a 20-year journey has landed him and his signature series Wrestling Empire on the Nintendo Switch, bringing a familiar style of game home on a console that’s not only perfect for it, but whose developer served as the inspiration for a career that has spanned more than 50 published games.

The road to Wrestling Empire has not been easy for the English developer, who also goes by MDickie, the eponymous name of his one-man shop. Despite having reached tens of millions of people from all over the globe with PC and mobile efforts, Dickie has endured some scathing reviews for otherwise successful games in the traditional sense. However, many of these reviews focus less on the nuts and bolts of his games and more on unfounded rhetoric and labeling. He has been called the “video game equivalent to Tommy Wiseau,” “the worst developer of all time,” and someone who is “in on the idea that he knows his games are kind of bad.” However, upon playing even 10 minutes of Dickie’s latest effort, it should become quickly apparent to the average gamer that nothing could be further from the truth.

The proof is in the pudding when it comes to Dickie’s work, and his growing YouTube channel is no exception. He blew past 100,000 subscribers in February of last year, and upon doing so received a silver plaque. He thanked the fans by sharing some words of wisdom that helped him through troubled times and abusive feedback: “If you don’t like the story life is telling you, tell life a different story.”

“What meant so much to me about this award was when it was red, it made me uncomfortable as my channel started as this source of ridicule,” Dickie said. “Just imagine the idea that 50,000 people could hate you and 1,000 people would like you. It was a real cause of anxiety for me, so by turning the logo from red to silver really meant a lot. I could have sat there and taken the abuse, or I could confront it in the middle of the ring and say I’m going to harness this better than my enemies, turn the tide on them and turn it into a source of positivity in my own life. It has since become this hub where I can set the right tone with more than 100,000 people and that’s a very powerful tool with my business now.”

That is not to say MDickie doesn’t enjoy interacting with his fans. To this day, he sets aside a couple of hours every morning to read and reply to emails, even if it means having to break out Google Translate. Connecting with his fans is one of his favorite parts about the job; however, he has notably steered clear of all other forums for feedback, particularly the comments sections on his Facebook and YouTube pages. The demanding, and in many cases, impolite mentions that find their way to the top of his posts don’t phase him the way they did at one time, and he has even found a way to eliminate Twitter mentions from his daily routine.

“I realized there is no happiness to be found in comment sections,” Dickie said. “I think I’ve reached a point in my career where I’m fairly well isolated from the negativity. It doesn’t reach me and doesn’t get to me, though it used to drive me crazy. I’m quite a sensitive person, so to be around that 24 hours a day, I wasn’t the right person for it and I’m a lot happier because of it.”

Whiz Kid

Born and raised in the North of England, Dickie has been making games his entire life. His childhood consisted of him spending the majority of his time in his parents’ newspaper press. Long before he owned a computer, Dickie spent his leisure time putting together his own original card, dice and board games fashioned out of cardboard. In doing so, he quickly discovered he had a knack for entertaining people through his creations. When Dickie got his hands on a computer as a teenager, the natural progression of his creative mindset brought him to computer games where he was able to replicate the games and ideas he crafted physically onto a screen.

“Even to this day, I think people would be surprised to hear how much of Wrestling Empire is the exact same logic, statistics and mathematics I was messing around with when I was eight years old,” Dickie said. “The base stats, strength, skill, agility, stamina and the relationship between them all in the 50-99-percent range has been with me now for more than 30 years and the new game is just a culmination of it.”

Although best known for his wrestling games, MDickie has dipped his toes into several genres between PC and mobile platforms. Not including his immense catalogue of wrestling games, he has created a professional soccer simulator, a music business simulator, boxing and MMA games, a prison simulator, a superhero simulator, a Jesus Christ simulator, a game about sports talk radio and a talk show game that blends Jerry Springer with the wrestling and fighting genre – and that’s just to name a few. Wrestling, however, is his bread and butter for good reason.

If you ask him, MDickie will tell you there’s two sides to his wrestling fandom. Initially, he got hooked on wrestling because of the larger-than-life figures of the ‘80s: Hulk Hogan, “Macho Man” Randy Savage and The Ultimate Warrior. The Rock ‘n’ Wrestling era amazed Dickie as it made him want to ask questions such as who were these characters and how do they get to look the way they do? By 1998, he began to take an interest in the politics of the wrestling business and the behind-the-scenes component, causing him to ask a different set of questions: What makes Steve Austin a star in the eyes of backstage figureheads and what is the rhyme or reason as to why he’ll win or drop the title on a given night? Eventually, Dickie became fully immersed with this side of pro wrestling, which served as a massive inspiration for the behind-the-curtain vibe of his games, as well as the “booking” edition each of his games have seen.

“For a long time, even when I wasn’t so much a fan of WWE anymore, I was still reading the news religiously on a daily basis,” Dickie said. “It was fascinating; studying the news of a TV show I did not watch about a sport I did not watch. I think that’s a testament to what I’ve thought of wrestling all along and podcasts from the likes of Conrad Thompson and Jim Cornette have been great to follow, too, because they analyze every second of every detail of the past we grew up in, yet I learn new things with every listen.”

In the present day, fans have taken to the matchmaking side of wrestling games like never before. We live in a world where SmackDown vs. Raw General Manager Mode takes top billing on Xavier Woods’ UpUpDownDown channel, Adam Ryland is still pumping out Total Extreme Warfare games and AEW is set to publish its very own matchmaking game. But nobody innovated the booking side of wrestling quite the way MDickie did. It did not, however, come without a fight, which might just be apropos for a developer of wrestling games.

The obstacles MDickie has faced with his wrestling games are not at all unlike the abuse wrestling fans still take on a daily basis both online and off. Those who don’t understand the odds and ends of pro wrestling generally don’t care to, and as a result, an inevitable tug of war is waged over concepts and ideals between friends, enemies, fathers and sons and even game developers and publishers.

“[The publisher] told me ‘nobody wants to play a game about the minutiae of a niche sport,’” Dickie said. “This type of conversation happens all the time in publishing meetings and people who don’t understand it don’t want to hear a single thing about it. As a result, I had to self-publish [the original Federation Booker] and the rest is history.”

These types of conversations made Dickie well equipped to do what he deemed necessary to land his latest game on the Nintendo Switch, which originally captured his attention and desire to make games with Super Mario Odyssey in 2019. Following a lengthy back-and-forth between Dickie and the company that once suspended his disbelief with games such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Dickie was eventually given the green light to begin development on his new game.

Nearly one year removed from receiving his development kit and overcoming the learning curve of new hardware, as well as a series of obstacles that nearly threatened to derail the whole project, MDickie achieved what he set out to do all along: bring pro wrestling back home to a Nintendo console. After all, he cites games like WWF No Mercy and WCW/nWo Revenge on the N64 as two of the greatest sources of influence for his wrestling games and many to this day consider these games to have set the bar for all wrestling games to follow. With Wrestling Empire, fans of the wrestling genre may have finally found the spiritual successor to No Mercy they’ve been in search of all along.

It’s All About The Game

Wrestling Empire may only be the first chapter in the story of MDickie, Nintendo Switch indie developer, but it’s an excellent effort and an immediate standout in the wrestling genre. Dickie claims that contrary to popular belief that the ongoing pandemic has been beneficial to the work-from-home crowd, it actually curbed his production as someone who homeschools his children, allowing him to achieve only a third of what he intended to in 2020. Even still, Wrestling Empire is the most polished wrestling experience in the MDickie catalogue, and that’s on Day 1.

The gameplay is as fluid as ever. Players will be able to smoothly transition between striking and grappling exchanges both on the feet and on the ground. Much of the reason for this is the experience Dickie gained in animating transitions for “Weekend Warriors,” his mixed martial arts game. However, the transitional combat is merely one example of Dickie becoming an influence for himself.

The game comes packed with a fully functional career mode and character editor, both of which are already as far along as they have ever been in an MDickie game. The career mode is now chock full of more storylines than ever before. Whether you’re meeting with upper management, other wrestlers or giving interviews on a variety of different podcasts, you’ll always have the ability to get what you want out of your career mode experience – so long as you remember to ask for a creative control clause in your contract.


Speaking candidly, a favorite of mine came when Jesse Ventura asked my character “Killer” Jack Keller whether he prefers the “80-year old red idiot” or the “80-year old blue idiot” to be the ruler of the free world. My answer notwithstanding, Ventura scolded me, telling me, “Keep that to yourself! Our democracy was built on the idea that you only vote for who the media tells you to.” It goes without saying this game is not lacking in MDickie’s signature wit and humor that is prevalent to varying degrees in each of his games. Dickie subscribes to the South Park standards where “nobody is safe and everybody and everything is fair game.” My only hope is that the game can make me laugh the way it did in that unforgettable moment.

As for the character editor, the enhanced capabilities allotted by the Switch’s hardware makes for the deepest character creation process MDickie has ever put together. Thanks to a greater emphasis on layering and morphing, the possibilities are now endless, and players will be able to come closer than ever to creating their ideal professional wrestler, manager or referee.

The ease of access is also a key, yet perhaps unheralded feature of Wrestling Empire. Thanks to the Switch’s touch screen, the creation of your favorite wrestlers will be made easier than ever, as you will be able to take advantage of sliders and the Switch’s touch keyboard. The capabilities of the Switch also make this volume the most multiplayer-friendly game he has ever produced, as well as the simplest to download and fire up.

MDickie has become something of a pariah in the industry for the low file size of his games and Wrestling Empire won’t do much to change the minds of those already made up. As it currently stands, Wrestling Empire eats just 261 MB against the console’s system memory and while some substantial updates to the game are in the works and on the way, Dickie doesn’t anticipate the game exceeding more than double that size. Contrast this with games like WWE 2K Battlegrounds, which is in the neighborhood of 10 GB, and even WWE 2K18 at 20 GB, and players will quickly find that, at least in this case, that size does not matter.

As of this writing, MDickie actually has more characters in his game than megabytes. The full game features more than 300 characters spanning over 11 different promotions or divisions: Wrestling Revolution, a home to his original characters, All-American Wrestling based on ‘80s WWF, Strong Style Wrestling based on ECW, Rising Sun Puroresu based on Japanese wrestling, Maple Leaf Grappling based on Jim Crockett Promotions and technical wrestling, Super Lucha Libre based on Mexican wrestling, Federation Online based on modern WWE (although at one time the MDickie home promotion), Weekend Warriors (also the name of Dickie’s MMA game on mobile platforms) based on the UFC, Wrestling School based on developmental, Hollywood based on wrestlers who crossover into the movies, and Legends, where your character will end up should you retire with a successful career.

Littering the game is a combination of wrestlers based on real likenesses and completely fictitious characters exclusively from the mind of MDickie. For many fans, some of these characters have taken on a life of their own, requesting that he make more characters because of a refusal to overwrite the ones he has already implemented from scratch.

“I actually prefer fictitious characters in my games,” Dickie said. “You can’t fail to create a fictitious character, but you can fail quite badly in trying to create a real person. If it was up to me, I’d fill my entire game with fictitious characters, but I know the first thing people are going to try and do is make real people, so I try to meet my fans halfway. I take one step towards you, you take one step towards me and we’ll meet in the middle.”


The art style is charming, simple and distinct. If you liked the look of MDickie games before, you’re going to like Wrestling Empire. If not, probably not so much. As for the names of the characters, many are based on puns having to do with their actual likeness. For example, Kurt Angle refitted to “Oliver Gold,” The Macho Man has become “Mat Showman” and Bret and Owen Hart have turned into “Brad Goodman and Oje Goodman.” Admittedly, this is pretty clever, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface when thinking about how MDickie came up with the names for over 300 different characters and likenesses.

“Coming up with the names is like a mental illness,” Dickie said. “I spend my time waking up in the mornings muttering random words to myself, ‘Score….. Benz….. All….. Cobain….. Whack….. Ax.’ I think that’s how George Lucas does his Star Wars characters. You can’t just call someone a normal name. That’d be too boring.”

Over time, MDickie has gained a reputation amongst his most loyal fans for being an innovator. After all, he is one of the first known developers to create a game based on the booking side of wrestling. In his latest effort, he has brought the concept of “move melding” to the forefront. In most games, you’ll have to grapple your opponent at the exact same time as your partner to execute a double-team move. Now? You can literally combine moves in real time, leading to a web of infinite possibilities. Have you ever seen a hurricanrana-to-a-piledriver before? How about a back body drop-to-a-vertical suplex? Both of these maneuvers are now possible thanks to the new physics system, and it doesn’t end with double-team moves. You can now throw your opponent into the air only for them to land on someone else and execute a counter that may or may not include an Ace Crusher or Rear Naked Choke. Eventually, it would not at all shock me to see a move conceived in this game make its way to the ring in real life. For MDickie, that would be a feather in the cap like none other.

“My favorite thing about these games is thinking about all the ways one human body can interact with another human body,” Dickie said. “And what’s great about video games is I don’t have to be realistic about it, so I can do all these ungodly things you wouldn’t necessarily see in a real wrestling match. I put a lot of effort into this animation system where anything can happen at any moment. You wouldn’t believe all the hours I’ve put into thinking how one can counter a hurricanrana. It’s like solving a puzzle. With every new move added to the game, there is a new counter and a new hybrid to be added as well.”

“No Mercy With Limits”

There’s plenty of more innovation to come from MDickie as it pertains to the Wrestling Empire. Now that the game has hit the Nintendo E-Shop, detailed and timely updates have already begun to roll out. On the second day of the game’s release, a patch went out that added to and balanced the variety of storylines and promos characters can partake in and cut in career mode. Soon, a booking mode will be coming to the game as is customary for MDickie games. In the months to come, fans can also expect an open world element to Wrestling Empire. While the open world feature in wrestling games is not unprecedented, no game has explored the concept the way Wrestling Empire intends to.

Additionally, new moves will rapidly be added to the game, keeping with tradition and precedent set by past MDickie releases. Although “beta” releases at full price has, to some, become a hot button issue in gaming, MDickie has seemingly earned plenty of equity and trust with his fans that he should have no problem consistently offering new content to his consumers. Based on the early returns, it seems he’ll have no trouble achieving a similar level of trust with new fans.

 Make no mistake, Wrestling Empire is not the broken mess fans have come to expect from the WWE 2K series and it features precisely none of the microtransactions that arguably ruined WWE 2K Battlegrounds. Rather, this game has trimmed the fat plaguing many games in the genre and created something that is both fun and creatively stimulating to the player.

To Dickie, Wrestling Empire is “No Mercy with no limits,” and if wrestling fans share that sentiment in even the slightest sense, the new game should not struggle to rack up a ton of mileage on Nintendo Switch systems around the world.

“No Mercy with no limits means a version of No Mercy that everybody loves with no loading times, more characters and inexpensive to produce and consume,” Dickie said. “These are all boxes I had to tick with my attempt at it, but I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. I’ve never had quite a perfect storm of response from people who are fed up with WWE, impatient for AEW and finding me and the middle as this safe haven for wrestling fans.”

Wrestling Empire is now available on the Nintendo E-Shop for $19.99, but for a limited time only, quick triggered fans will be able to download the game at $15.99. Make sure to follow MDickie on his Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts to keep up with updates and behind the scenes content.

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