TNA iMPACT’s story mode starts off with a narration from the character Suicide, a masked wrestler who’s at the top of his career. After crossing the wrong people within the organization, he’s beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead. He awakes from a coma later, only to find himself immobilized in a Mexican hospital. That’s when players design their own vision of the man beneath the suit in the create-a-wrestler mode. It’s a variation of a conceit that games with customized characters have used before—set up the story with a faceless hero, then let the player take over.
Where TNA iMPACT deviated from the norm is how Suicide made it into the real-life ring. “[Midway] had to get their story approved, obviously, because we’re a licensor,” says Steve Allison, chief marketing officer at TNA. “But we had no idea what Suicide would look like or how we would introduce him. We never saw what he looked like before we reviewed the story mode, because he wasn’t our talent, who they’d have to get approved. It was sort of up to them initially, because as far as the story went he was going to go away, and then it would switch to the create-a-player. We didn’t really have that in our approval loop. We just came out and reviewed the story mode, and everyone was like, ‘Hey, that guy’s really cool.’
“We just liked the way the guy looked and the way the story felt, and our creative guys, after a little collaboration and prodding from myself and some of the office staff, decided to give him a shot and have him come out as a real, live character. We went from a wild idea to a bunch of creative guys writing him into the show. The artists at Midway, they were inspired a little by Spider-Man, and I think the Midway ‘M’ is the inspiration for the Batman-style thing that sits under the word ‘Suicide.’ They created it, and when we saw it, we showed it to our costume artist and she said, ‘I can completely replicated that into a kick-ass suit.’
“The guys said, ‘Let’s see it,’ and when we saw the suit, we decided we had to do this. From there, it was several weeks of just trying to figure out how we’d do it. Should we say he’s from the game? Should we just have him appear on the show? Ultimately, we did initially say he’s from the game—we are wrestling, so we do get to walk that line between blatant promotion and cheese. The gimmick, having him fly from the rafters and stuff, a lot of work went into that. It did sort of happen from three or four people in creative inspired to see what they could do. When the person they had in mind saw the story mode from the game and we talked to him about what his current character was doing on air and what he could do with it, he became very inspired about changing his style of wrestling and how the storyline could go. What’s really cool about it is we had no idea of how people would accept it. I go to a lot of tapings, and the crowd loves this guy. We do fan polls, and they just love the dude. Last week on our Destination X pay-per-view, he won the X Division championship. So he’s now the champion of our high-flying division, and will be for a while.”
In addition to adding Suicide to the show’s roster of wrestlers, TNA and Midway worked together in other ways to promote the game. “About eight weeks before the game shipped, we replaced the video montage intro with the same theme song, we recut it to use all video-game footage, and we ran that as the opener for every show,” says Allison. “It was the same intro, but instead of in-ring live action, it used in-ring video-game footage for the 90 seconds that it runs. For any character or roster member that appears in the game, we replaced their entrance video footage that plays behind them with the pyro, we used video-game footage.”
And just who is the man in the actual Suicide suit? Allison wouldn’t say anything specific, but he did drop a hint. “He’s been around a while.” Hmmm…
