On Saturday night, the latest NXT TakeOver will hit Houston, and will be headlined by the first War Games match (or WarGames, as the title of the event insists) in 17 years. The match will look similar in some ways (two rings; a steel cage), and very different in others (no roof; shark cages).
When WWE announced the rules for the modern-day WarGames match, there was some rumbling and grumbling among longtime fans and purists. When word got out in the past few days that the cage wouldn’t have a roof, the rumbles and grumbles turned into harrumphs and groans, respectively.
According to many both inside and outside of WWE, Triple H is among those who have been pushing for years for WWE to finally have a WarGames match, and it reportedly came close to happening a bunch of times over the past decade. Reports have always indicated that Vince McMahon was staunchly opposed to the idea, but clearly something has changed.
In a new interview with NBC Sports, Triple H talked about a whole variety of topics surrounding NXT and TakeOver, but he spoke at length about how he’s always been an admirer of the WarGames format, and how he finally managed to get it approved.
“For me ‘WarGames’ has always been a very viable concept. It wasn’t just a name, it was a branding of a match that was meaningful in WCW. It’s something I’ve always had interest in. I’ve always liked the concept as a fan.
As we move forward with NXT, it’s really started to become its own brand. We’ve had opportunities to do different things, whether that is ladder matches, or cage matches. But there was an opportunity that came along, given the weekend with Survivor Series and given the position [NXT] is in to brand something out and create something that NXT could own.
It seemed like the perfect time to bring it out, so I dusted it off. Throughout the years, I was aware of Vince’s feelings about it. There were some things about that match that he liked and there were some things about the concept that he didn’t necessarily think worked, especially in today’s world.
So I brought it back up to him and we walked through the process and I said here’s the way I think we can make this match work for us and he liked it, agreed with it, thought it worked great for NXT and was real happy to do it. So here we are.”
He was also asked about the changes to the match, and fans being unhappy it wasn’t the same WarGames that they remembered so fondly and have been calling for for so long.
“When you do this, the goal is not to go backwards. My goal isn’t to make people go, ‘oh is this as good as it was back then?’ I want to put a slightly different spin on it, so that it begins again and takes a life of its own because it can’t be what it was.
[ … ]
“There is some complexity to it, even though there are some people saying, ‘But it’s three teams, it isn’t the same as it originally was.’ The thing is we don’t have the Four Horseman, with a manger, to make a five-man team. It convoluted the concept to me if you hogedpodge things together.
When the stories logically go to the next place and they just kind of connect together, that’s when they’re the best and I feel like that’s how this happened. Once we knew we were going to do it, it organically started to come together. You have Authors of Pain, you have Sanity, you have the Undisputed Era. There’s a three-way thing that is combustible and needs to be solved inside a double cage … what other way would you solve it? (Laughs)
So you organically get there and then there were some logistical ways to figure out the issues that were created by the concept. For example, someone could say, ‘well, why doesn’t the rest of the team just run out and try to get into the cage?’ Well they can’t because they’re in this other cage.
Hopefully this becomes a yearly event. Is this exact iteration of what we’ll see in the future? I don’t know. I hope so, but if there’s something in this that doesn’t work, then we’ll tweak it a little and try to perfect it.
Everything goes through its little changes in the beginning and then where it ends up you just kind of naturally end up and you forget about those little changes that happen over time. When you go back and look at them 10 years later you might go, ‘oh my God, I forgot that they started it that way.’”
The entire interview is well worth your time and covers a wide swath of topics. You may not ever be able to forgive Triple H for changing WarGames, but at least he has some reasoning behind the tweaks.
