Wrestling with absurdity: Inside Video Game Championship Wrestling, the internet's glitchiest sport

During a live show, Bazza's role is to announce an audio feed over the top and manage any major technical errors that occur. That's because in the VGCW, matches have always been strictly CPU vs. CPU, with no human interference whatsoever. This results in two interesting oddities. The first is that, unlike in actual professional wrestling, the outcomes of matches aren't rigged or pre-scripted; it's all left to the software. Insane upsets or unexpected twists and turns are all possible, effectively a single roll of the dice away.

The second is that, with the various glitches of WWE '13, some unexpected things can occur. To wit: the spontaneous generation of a bizarre, fan-driven storyline. In late November 2012, a standard "Money in the Bank" fight — a type of match where six wrestlers race to set up ladders to retrieve a briefcase dangling from the ceiling — resolved in about a minute flat when a series of crippling pathfinding errors prevented any other competitor from stopping Zangief (Street Fighter) from instantly taking the win.

"I thought that wasn't fun for anyone to watch," remembers Bazza, "so I redid the match, and Little Mac (Punch Out!!) won. He didn't have any character beforehand, but afterwards, everyone associated him with me — they said I'd screwed Zangief over in favor of Little Mac."

Fans dubbed it the Soviet Screwjob, a reference to Zangief's Russian origins and to pro wrestling's infamous Montreal Screwjob. Bazza decided to roll with it. "I got the idea for the storyline from the chat's reaction, which is kind of how a lot of storyline and plots and tag teams have developed," Bazza says. "It's got a lot to do with the fans, and how they perceive things."

WWE '13 also includes a Create-a-Story mode, where a player can — with some effort — cobble together short scenes out of pre-made animations and player-inputted text. Bazza utilized this to cast Zangief as the aggrieved victim, Little Mac as a thuggish, company-approved enforcer and himself (in the body of the WWE's real-life chairman and occasional wrestler Vince McMahon) as the VGCW's corrupt manager. The ongoing feud continued throughout the shows that followed, until ultimately, in the first season's finale, Little Mac turned on McMahon before being hit by a car.

"Basically, the first season was kind of done on the fly," Bazza says. "And as we started to go into season two, I opened up Notepad and started typing up a basic skeleton of what the rest of the seasons were going to be from there."

The story since then has touched on classic wrestling tales — betrayals, tournaments, championship titles and a hostile takeover of the management of the VGCW itself — mixed in with the more fanciful elements of a video game world. Demonic deals with Dracula (Castlevania), the identity of the mysterious Mr. L (Super Paper Mario) and Chaos Emerald-powered time travel are among the weird and wonderful concepts touched on so far.

Of course, the unpredictable nature of the VGCW means that Bazza can't write too far ahead. "When I write the storylines," he explains, "they're very, very basic. Because, depending on the outcome of the matches, I might have to completely change the way a story's going to progress."

When preparing for a show, Bazza spends anywhere from two to seven hours creating each roughly two-hour long episode. He's got to lay out the overall plot, including the alternate cutscenes that account for any possibly branching paths. He's got to write the script up and laboriously enter it by hand into the PS3, a task made more difficult by the game's problematic interface. There's other bits of housekeeping, too: changing up movesets and editing the created wrestlers and their entrances to better fit the show.

"Luckily, I've got really good fans that contribute a lot," he says. "I don't know how to use Photoshop for the life of me. So stuff that's been contributed — that's all done by fans who've done it off their own backs, just because they love the show."

Not only are the fans contributing parts of the show itself — musical remixes, video production efforts, banners and the custom wrestler designs as well — but they've also created various external bits that keep it afloat. An extensive Google document tracks wins and losses and collects links and timestamps to as many shows as possible. The fan-made wiki, meanwhile, solidifies the somewhat loose consensus into something more concrete, something more real.

One fan even attempts to derive an "objective" set of power rankings for every character in the federation; the updated stats are posted, alongside a pseudo-serious match write-up, after each and every show. "I think that's awesome," says Bazza. "Since I started noticing his stats, I've been basing a lot of the match-ups off of them."

Of course, it's very easy for a crowd to become a mob. Bazza keeps a handle on the more juvenile aspects of the crowd — the attention-seeking, insult-spewing segments — partially through the efforts of a handful of fan moderators, but primarily by ignoring it. "If I start telling people not to say this, not to say that, well ... you know what the internet's like," he shrugs.

"I think it's worked. People've slowed down on that kind of thing, but, well, there's always going to be people acting like that. There's not a lot you can do."

But there's also the risk of fan backlash — serious fan backlash — when people get perhaps too invested in the show. When controversial fighter Charles Barkley (of real-life basketball fame, but also star of indie hit Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden) grabbed the title belt, portions of the fanbase absolutely exploded, lobbing abuse and complaints at the show — and at Bazza, who in the heat of the moment threatened to cancel the show entirely.

"I got pretty annoyed, I overreacted and flipped my shit at some of those reactions," he says carefully. "But, honestly speaking, the main reason I got mad about it is because I didn't want Barkley to win. Because I knew that everyone would get mad. So when he won, I was like, 'Fuck. This is going to be so bad.' I sort of lost my temper, and I shouldn't have, really."

Even that, though, was eventually funneled into the show; Barkley showed up the next week to cut a scathing promo directly to the crowd (a reference to real-life wrestler CM Punk's kayfabe-breaking "pipebomb" shoot that made major waves in the pro-wrestling world). The audience ate it up. "That was really risky, that whole thing," sighs Bazza. "But a lot of people really liked it. It took a lot of heat off him."