Why is WWE SmackDown: Here Comes the Pain considered the best of its series?

Released in North America on October 27, 2003, developed by Yuke's and published by THQ, Here Comes the Pain is the fifth SmackDown game and the peak of the line. Its Metacritic score of 85 is the highest the series ever earned: 9.1 from IGN, 9 from GameSpot, 9 from Eurogamer. It won Best Fighting Game at the first Spike Video Game Awards in 2003, and in Britain it went ELSPA Platinum, for sales over 300,000 copies there alone.

The roster was a handover and a coronation at once. It was the first game in the series with playable legends, including Jimmy Snuka, Roddy Piper, and the Deadman-era Undertaker. It introduced John Cena, Batista, and Rey Mysterio as playable wrestlers, and it was the last series entry with The Rock and Steve Austin as active roster members rather than legends. Brock Lesnar, the cover star, anchors a roster built at the exact moment one era passed to the next.

Under the hood, Yuke's rebuilt the grappling: a new system with body-part damage shown on screen, submission struggles with meters and rope breaks, and attribute stats that made a giant and a cruiserweight play differently. It put the Elimination Chamber in a video game for the first time. Season Mode grew a locker room, decisions, and backstage politics, so a year in the game finally felt like a year in the business.

Its standing is measurable: in IGN's fan Face-off, Here Comes the Pain finished second only to No Mercy among all wrestling games. The SmackDown series ran for years afterward and got bigger. It never again got better reviewed, and the fans never voted another of its entries higher.