WWF Attitude

Overview

Stone Cold. The Rock. Undertaker. Mankind. DX.

The Attitude Era assembled on a single disc in 1999, when every Monday Night Raw was an event and the wrestling wars between WWF and WCW had made professional wrestling appointment television for teenagers and adults alike.

The Roster

Forty-plus wrestlers representing the peak commercial moment of professional wrestling. The specific moment — 1999 — when the Monday Night War was still ongoing, when Stone Cold Steve Austin’s anti-authority character had made the WWF the dominant force in sports entertainment, when The Rock was ascending from midcard to main event.

The roster is a document. Look at who’s there and when they arrived — who’s at the top, who’s rising, who’s fading. WWF Attitude’s roster is a photograph of a specific period rather than a curated greatest-hits selection.

The Commentary

Jim Ross calling the action. Jerry Lawler on color commentary. The actual voices of the Monday Night Raw announce team in the game, providing commentary in the cadence that viewers had been conditioning themselves to associate with WWF matches.

JR’s “BUSINESS IS ABOUT TO PICK UP” and Lawler’s characterizations of heels and faces — the vocabulary of the era present in the game’s audio. Commentary in wrestling games before this was generic. Attitude put the actual broadcast team in the booth.

The Era

The Attitude Era’s match types arrived in the game alongside the roster. Hell in a Cell — the structure that had produced some of the era’s most extreme moments. Ladder matches. Royal Rumble. The match catalog of a period when WWF was inventing new match types to keep viewers engaged.

The wrestlers, the commentary, the match types, the career mode. The game is the Attitude Era as a product rather than the Attitude Era observed from outside it.