Oh yeah, wrestling games are marketed just like soccer or football. A lot of the selling power is that person on the cover and persons in the game.

My favorite wrestling game is Pro Wrestling on the NES and it has no licensed characters at all. Next is Tecmo World Wrestling, also on the NES. Again, no licensed characters at all. To me, both are much better than any wrestling games we received on the NES that featured licensed characters - neither sold like the licensed character games though. Sad but true.

Yeah, nostalgia sometimes makes us blind to the real world situations companies faced back then. While sound chips and things are dirt cheap today, that is not the world that we lived in back in the mid 1990's. Just look at Sega's use of a DSP chip in Virtua Racing for Sega Genesis - that games was $99.99 to $114.99 (depending on which store you went to) when it launched. That was more than the console itself, I believe, as Genesis was around $100 or less at that point.

I wonder why they didn't do a Sega CD version of this one like they did Rage in the Cage?