I’ve been a fan of the Smackdown series since it debuted back in 1999-2000, when I played about five minutes of the original one at my friend Pete’s house. Neither he nor the majority of my high school core group of friends liked wrestling, so it last only five minutes and didn’t amount to much. But I personally thought the graphic for WWF Smackdown! were great (this is coming from someone that grew up with the 8 bit graphic of a Nintendo Entertainment System and thought those were pretty good), now looking back they were kind of crap.

I didn’t have to wait too long until I would be able to play my next Smackdown game, this one entitled Smackdown! 2: Know Your Role. My roommate in college, Chris, brought his Playstation (that’s right, back in the day of the PSones!) and it was the greatest thing in my mind. Not only did we both love wrestling, but to have that game was something else. I mean, there were a lot of limitations, like you could only have 4 entrants at a time in a Royal Rumble and the graphic as you can see below, weren’t much better than the year prior. But dammit, did they not give me great memories.

I wouldn’t play the next Smackdown game (called Smackdown!: Just Bring It!) for a while, Chris didn’t get a PS2 for a while and by the time he did, I was already an RA and on my own, with Melissa. She ended up buying me (or us) a PS2, honestly mostly because I wanted a DVD player and thought that the PS2 would be a good way to get my residents to hang out (never happened, those kids were crazy my first year, they know who they are!). I bought Just Bring It! and it was OK, the graphics were slightly better, but the storyline just sucked, you were done a few matches into your “season”. I think this was around October of 2002 or so and it was just a disappointing game all together.

Not to worry though, I somehow managed to get the next game for Christmas of that very same year as Smackdown!: Shut Your Mouth ended up being one of my presents. This was an amazing game, everything that was wrong with the last game was made good in this one. Great story mode, great graphics, and all. I was in heaven.  Here is the cover art for the game, as taken by me back on Christmas Day 2002, as I was using my digital camera that Melissa bought me to take pictures of all of my presents. And yes, those are twenty dollar bills surrounding the game, I wish I knew what happened to all of that money…

I believe the next game was the last to be given to me as a gift for a very long time, Smackdown!: Here Comes The Pain, with UFC’s Brock Lesnar on the cover (in fact, the “Here Comes The Pain” thing was his gimmick).

“Pain” and “Shut Your Mouth” were my favorites. I think I would continue to play Pain for a few more years just playing the seasons and keeping them going, bouncing from character to character.

I don’t believe I played the next Smackdown game, which was the first official Smackdown! VS Raw game. In fact, it didn’t have a year attached to it, I don’t think they knew what they were going to do with this one.  But honestly, after Here Comes the Pain, the rest of these all look the same. They changed somethings and I more or less lost interest.

I do think I played Smackdown! vs Raw 2006 but didn’t think much of it. This would be the beginning of a long trend of John Cena on the cover art for Smackdown games.

I definitely played the next two games, Smackdown vs Raw 2007 (the first of which did not have the “!” mark on it. In fact, it wasn’t until a year ago that I realized the Smackdown name no longer had the “!” in its title. Why didn’t any tell me this? I would also receive for Christmas in 2007 it seems the Smackdown vs Raw 2008 (since they always put out the next year’s name the year prior, like car models are always a year ahead). This just made me realize how long I’ve had my PSP because that was the year I was given that as a gift. Time does fly by. My intentions on that gift were to play it when I went into the city to go to film gigs…those were my intentions at least.

Now we come up to the newest game, which is Smackdown vs Raw 2011, is coming out next week on Oct. 26th, 2010, and it looks pretty good. I would dare say, add this to Christmas List 2010.

Here is the trailer for Smackdown vs Raw 2010: