WWE 2K20 - Chatting with Kofi Kingston
Some of the hottest WWE Stars were in Australia recently for the WWE Live event and I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with wrestling megastar and videogame aficionado, Kofi Kingston.
Maxi-Geek: Those who know you, may be aware that you are a big gamer, thanks to your outfits for select tag team matches. How much fun is it, to bring video games and wrestling together?
Kofi Kingston: It is so cool, it is probably one of the coolest parts of my job, because when I was a kid, I said I was gonna be one of two things, I was either going to be a wrestler or a professional video game tester. Whatever that is, you know I wanted to play games for a living, and now with Xavier Woods ‘Up, Up, Down, Down’ YouTube channel, we get paid to play video games. It’s like we were going to play anyway, but we put it on YouTube and let anyone see, the WWE characters outside of the ring and outside of their in-ring personas. We get to just be ourselves, play some videogames and often times it gets very competitive, I think videogames is I get the most competitive when I play games and people see me on the channel and are like ‘that’s not you at all, your so mean when you play videogame, I talk a lot of trash. We grew up playing games and a lot of people said videogames are not going to get you anywhere, you need to be doing this or doing that, and now we legitimately play video games and we get paid to do it, so you know we showed them.
On top of that, it is a very interactive experience and now you have online, where people play from their own homes, you don’t even get to see each other, back in my day, we used to play video games at the arcade, where you would actually have human, one on one interactions. In a lot of ways, videogames brought people together, cause you have something to bond over, people came from a whole bunch of different backgrounds, you know what I mean, whatever the differences that you had, those didn’t matter when you got onto an arcade machine. So, videogames do bring people together, in a very serious way.
MG: So obviously WWE 2K20 is the latest game for Wrestling fans, when did you first see yourself in the series and what was that like?
KK: I think my first videogame, wrestling game was 2000, I debuted in 2008, so I think later that year, so I think Smackdown Vs Raw, but eventually getting taken over by 2K, was awesome for everyone involved. You know they have basketball and back in the day they used to have a football game as well and they do a very good job, it was like a hand and glove fit. So again for me, I grew up playing video games, so when create a character, everybody’s mind was blown, you can create yourself and I would spend just hours and hours, working on my cheek bones and then making my eyes a certain level, bringing them down and then bringing them closer and it would nothing like me.
Now we get scanned, we walk in one day and they are like, ‘oh 2K is here, they are going to scan you for the game’. We sit in this room, with all these millions of cameras, well not millions but it seems like it, there are a ton in this futuristic all white room, and you just sit there and they take all the details, with so many pictures and when the game comes out, its actually you. It looks just like you, moves just like you, with the motion capture and everything and it doesn’t get old, you know I’ve probably been in 10 or 11 videogames now and every year I am always blown away, cause I do remember back in the day, it was a dream, almost an impossible dream, to be in video game. It would be like, ‘that would be awesome to be in a videogame one day, I will just put myself in’ but now, to not have to do that as a gamer, it is definitely one of the coolest things about what I do and probably one of the career highlights that I have, is being in WWE 2K.
MG: Have you ever had the chance to play the game and decide to be a villain, as you were a villain for a while in the ring?
KK: Yeah, its cool, because you do have that option with the career modes, you have the choice to do the dastardly things and for me, I’ve spent the majority of my career as a babyface, as a good guy, but as you said for a while, myself, Xavier Woods and Big E, we got to be bad guys for a while. I always say its one of the things that I miss the most, because its ok to yell at children, you know and berate children and threaten to ground them and I miss that, cause kids get so into our product. Obviously the young fans are a very big part of our fanbase, so we do a lot of what we do for the kids, so we make sure they are having a good time, so to go out there and just scold kids and know that later in that match, the good guy will hopefully be the bad guy and then you see the kid and he is pointing at me and cheering at my defeat.
So I will shake my fist at them and all of a sudden, we have given them a story and a memory and I think it’s cool with WWE 2K, you can go in and really choose what route you want to go, in these career modes as it gets more and more intricate every year and the stories get better and better.
MG: Have you ever submitted and move to the devs for the game, that would never work in real life, without a host of wires and stunt people?
KK: Yeah, sadly I have not. They usually do a pretty good job of keeping it real, I remember when WWE All Stars came out, which was kind of like an arcade style, which I thought was really, really cool, so you could do a lot of moves, I do a move called the SOS, where I hook my opponent on his arm, I go up and do a front flip, while they do a backflip and it ends up in a pin, but in that game they did like three or four flips and then ended up in the pin. I always thought it was cool when they did stuff like that, and I think the cool thing about WWE 2K and 2K20 is that it gets more real every year, you know it’s a very realistic experience for the gamer and I think that’s what a lot of people look for, with a lot of the sports games that come out, people want something authentic and I think WWE 2K gives you that.
MG: Until they throw in the Terminator, then all bets are out the window.
KK: Yeah, but that’s also cool cause there goes that crossover again, as you have different people from different universes, that you didn’t think you would get to see in a game. You can go to create a character and try there, but you never get to see them in the story line, but now you can go into a story and they are the actual Terminator, it’s just so cool. Mortal Kombat does a really cool job of that too, bringing in characters from different genres that you would not expect to see and all of a sudden you get to control them and do all their moves. I think it is really, really cool when you have that crossover.
MG: In the game, would you like to see your digital counterpart fight anyone from pop culture, like the Predator.
KK: Yeah, I think that would be awesome, when I said, when they did that with Mortal Kombat, I think with MK X, they had Predator there and Alien and its always cool to see that cross over, when you don’t have to create the character and fantasise about the actual situation happening. It’s cool when its in the game, cause it’s a part of it and the story lines they make sense, you know what I mean and playing with your friends, going up against each other, with one person being the Terminator, it is really cool. I think the developers, who are all gamers, obviously and they share that same fandom of wanting that to happen, but a long winded answer to your question, no, I have not suggested that, but I think they do a good job of incorporating that into the game, as they know what the gaming fans, what the people want.
MG: We have touched on the fact that you are a gamer, ever so slightly
KK: Yeah.
MG: If you could appear in a different game, like Super Smash Bros of something, what would be the game you would want to be in?
KK: Without even thinking about it, Mortal Kombat, because I am a big fighting game connoisseur, I can remember the first time that I played Street Fighter II and the first time I played Mortal Kombat, going back to the days in the Arcade. I played that in the Boys and Girls club, I walked in and everyone was crowded around this videogame and playing Street Fighter II and Guile and Ryu, figuring out how to do all the moves. And Mortal Kombat as well, I grew up on that game, going from the era where the violence in the game was not acceptable and then the controversy and as a kid and a gamer you wanted to experience that, but the adults were trying to stop you. So to have been through that history and now Mortal Kombat has become a staple of the videogame world and the fighting game world and holds a very nostalgic feeling, each time they release it, I am always on it, so if they offered, it would be again, another dream come true.
MG: Would you consider bringing in a new video game themed intro to the WWE?
KK: We tried to do that, and you had mentioned it earlier, in Wrestlemania, two years ago, where myself, Woods and E hosted, we actually collaborated with Final Fantasy and came out as Final Fantasy characters. That is pretty much what you were just saying, incorporating the videogame world into the WWE, and obviously a company like Square Enix knows that many of the WWE fans out there are avid videogame players. It is definitely something that we think about all the time, even Woods, when he came out with this Trombone, he played the fanfare, if you were just a wrestling fan, you would be like oh cool, it’s a nice tune on the Trombone, but if you were a Final Fantasy fan, you are instantly like ‘oh my god’, so it’s something we think about all the time as gamers, is that how can we bring gaming onto the WWE screens.
MG: Last question for me then, WWE 2K20 is out now in Australia, what is the one thing you hope people enjoy most about the game?
KK: I hope they enjoy the realism; you know I haven’t had the chance to play the game yet, but from what I have seen, it’s probably like the smoothest its been, you know and little things like that matter. As cool as it is to have all these features and that’s the key, you want to be able to have a smooth gaming experience and I think 2K does a good job every year that not only does the consumer get cool feature sin the game but also a great experience and they just keep raising the bar every year.
Many thanks to Kofi for answering my questions and to 2K for setting it up. WWE 2K20 is out now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
