Why is WWF No Mercy considered the greatest wrestling game ever made?

WWF No Mercy arrived in November 2000, developed by AKI Corporation with Asmik Ace and published by THQ, at the very end of the Nintendo 64's life. The critics were immediate: a Metacritic score of 89, 9.5 from Game Informer, 9 from IGN, 92 percent from N64 Magazine. It sold over a million copies, the third best-selling wrestling game on the console, behind two of its own AKI predecessors.

The content was the deepest of its era: more than 60 wrestlers, seven branching championship story paths that change with wins and losses, and the SmackDown Mall, where finishers, moves, and wrestlers were unlocked with money earned in the ring. It was the first of AKI's WWF games to brawl backstage, it added the ladder match to the series, and its create-a-wrestler tools let players rebuild anyone the license left out.

The honest faults are part of the record: slowdown when four wrestlers fill the screen, blocky graphics, and artificial intelligence that reverses a little too well. None of it has mattered. In 2009, Nintendo's own magazine ranked it among the seventy greatest Nintendo games ever made. In IGN's fan Face-off, No Mercy won 80.5 percent of its matchups, the highest rate of any wrestling game. In 2013, a producer on the then-current WWE games said publicly what fans kept asking him: why can't you make the new WWE games like No Mercy?

The afterlife sealed it. For over twenty-five years, modders have rebuilt No Mercy with modern rosters using tools built for the purpose, and its director, Hideyuki Iwashita, was consulted on AEW Fight Forever in 2023. WWE itself paid tribute when NXT named its September 2023 premium live event No Mercy and opened it with a recreation of the game's intro. Games get called the greatest on nostalgia. This one keeps getting cited by the people who make its successors.