Fantasy wrestling

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Fantasy wrestling (also referred to as "e-wrestling") is an umbrella term representing the genre of role-playing and statistics-based games which are set in professional wrestling companies. Several variants of Fantasy Wrestling exist: segregated both by the way they are transmitted (through websites, message boards, e-mail, postal mail, or face-to-face) and the method in which the storyline is determined (via roleplay, "angles", strategy- or statistics-based systems, etc.)

Fantasy wrestling's roots lie in the play-by-mail wrestling games that became prominent in the mid-to-late 1980s during one of professional wrestling's boom periods. In the early 1990s, the advent of national bulletin board services like PRODIGY, AOL and Compuserve allowed players to use e-mail and bulletin board to more easily trade information and post roleplay. As technology progressed and the internet evolved, fantasy wrestling enthusiasts took advantage, using websites and newsgroups to connect and build broader communities for gameplay.

A recent trend in fantasy wrestling are retroactive simulations of previous wrestling organizations and their promotions on wrestling message boards. This type of fantasy wrestling was first widely popularized on the Virtual Wrestling Forum on the Wrestling Classics website with the creation of the Wrestling Classics Fantasy League in 2001. The WCFL was originally created to test whether the knowledgeable readers of the Board would be successful in holding together a territorial wrestling organization unlike its real life counterpart, the National Wrestling Alliance, which collapsed under the onslaught of the Vince McMahon World Wrestling Federation national expansion in the 1980s.

The simulation starts in year 1981 (20 years back), with each promotion drafting, trading, and maintaining rosters similar to a sports franchise, in real time. Then, using its roster members, each “promoter” posts match results and storylines using their own booking ideas. Since the inception for the WCFL, other, similar simulations have appeared in the Forum. The WCFL continues to exist to this day, with matches currently in year 1986. Among some of the innovations WCFL virtual promoters have introduced in their alternate wrestling universe include traveling world tag team champions, an annual Super Bowl of Wrestling featuring matches from various promotions, entry and parity drafts, a nationwide touring Great American Bash, and many others.

In 2006 several fantasy writers started a second retro-simulation, NWA Classic on the FanFest Forum. This exercise is very similar to the WCFL with the exception that the league takes place starting year 1976, and features a “rivalry” angle between the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) and the American Wrestling Association (AWA), which unlike its real life 1970s counterpart, consists of several promotions across the country, rather than one promotion.