For as long as mankind (no, not Mick Foley) has been around, the human race has sought to see into the future.
Who wouldn’t benefit from knowing what life would bring them? To know what pitfalls they could avoid down the line with a simple change to their present.
At one time, believers turned to the stars to see the future, while in the Middle Ages, the locations and number of holes in a block of cheese would be used to foretell coming events.
These days, WWE fans can look to Video Games to predict the future, with some gaming moments coming true in the real world.
Here are five times WWE Video Games predicted the future.
5: The Return of ECW
While it was named SmackDown Vs. Raw 2006, the game, like others in the series, was released months before its cover year, and in fact came out in late 2005.
The second game of the SVR series saw a story mode where Rob Van Dam captured the WWE Championship, which just so happened to coincide with a soft relaunch of ECW.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Mere months after the game’s release, RVD would win the Money in the Bank contract, and cash in on John Cena at ECW One Night Stand 2006 to become WWE Champion.
While the game was not 100% accurate, as it included an RVD heel turn and failed to predict his real-life arrest for drug possession, the game got very close to what’d happen months later.
4: The Women’s Royal Rumble
In 2018, Asuka made history by winning the first-ever Women’s Royal Rumble, which was followed by the immediate debut of Ronda Rousey.
Since then, Becky Lynch, Charlotte Flair, Bianca Belair, and Rousey herself have won the Women’s Rumble, but so has Mickie James.
Well, kinda.
In SVR 2010, Mickie James’s storyline on the Road to WrestleMania introduced the Women’s Royal Rumble, which the player, James, would have to win.
As if the Women’s Rumble being predicted eight years early isn’t spooky enough, but James enters the in-game Rumble pretty late and did so in the real first Rumble, where she was #26.
Mickie returned to WWE this year to compete in the Women’s Royal Rumble, and while the Impact Wrestling star didn’t win, she does have a pseudo-historic win to her name.
The Women’s Revolution
In 2015, after years of seeing their ‘Divas’ as little more than eye candy with muscles, WWE began making a deliberate effort to take Women’s Wrestling more seriously.
This has proven to be a fantastic move for WWE, with some of the best matches each year coming from their women’s division, but this could have been much earlier.
In SmackDown Vs. Raw 2007’s Raw story mode, after a match between Candice Michelle and Mickie James, Lita attacks both women, on the orders of Stephanie McMahon.
From the ramp, Stephanie declares that it is time for women’s wrestling to be treated more seriously, and that women will no longer be seen in WWE as mere sex objects.
But since this is 2007, she gets massive boos from the crowd. Ugh!
Yes, when Stephanie McMahon (or at least her in-game alter ego) called for WWE to tidy up the more risque actions of their Divas, she became the top heel, alongside Lita, and for some reason, Kurt Angle.
What follows is the entire WWE Divas roster (sans Lita) rallying behind your character, fighting against women’s wrestling being focused on wrestling and not sex appeal.
A bizarre storyline in hindsight, it also gave fans arguably the most bizarre line in any wrestling video game.
“If Stephanie had her way, all of the Divas would be wearing burkas and a veil, as if the Taliban was running the show.”
Trish Stratus (WWE SmackDown Vs. Raw 2007.)
DX Reunited
For Shawn Michaels’ Road to WrestleMania in SVR 2009, HBK was livid at the idea that Triple H would break up DX and reunite with Evolution.
In-game, DX was riding high, but Randy Orton had been trying to goad the Game back to Evolution, which also included Batista.
Sure enough, this happened in 2014, over five years after the game’s release, and the similarities did not stop there.
Not only did Evolution reunite in the game like in real life, but in both instances, Ric Flair was nowhere to be seen.
Flair was on his way out of WWE when SVR 09 launched in late 2008, while for 2014, his focus was on his daughter Charlotte.
WWF Has Attitude in 1994
The history of WWE has often been broken down by fans as ‘eras’ and for many, none was better than the Attitude Era.
Raw was certainly at its most popular during this period, with millions of fans tuning in each week and seeing the iconic WWF scratch logo.
Except, this logo was used years before the company found its attitude.
Eagle-eyed fans who played WWF Raw on the SNES/Genesis will have spotted that at commentary, a monitor can be seen emblazoned with the WWF Attitude ‘scratch’ logo.
It’s ironic that this game came out during the height of the New Generation era, full of colorful characters and silly personalities: a far cry from the gritty attitude of Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock and others.
Perhaps someone in WWF’s gaming department had been working on bringing in attitude for years before it actually happened, but whatever the case, this game proved a sign of what was going to come.