SmackDown! confidential - part 1

Why are there so many different costumes for a wrestler like Rey Mysterio, but in the game there's only one? One year it's red, one year it's white, but there's only one.

Colin Mack: It's really expensive, basically... in terms of work. All this is [3D character] modeling work. It kind of goes along with the roster. The first thing, you get the roster set out, so you know, OK, these sixty guys, ten legends, a few characters you can't play. And over the course of the year, we have how much modeling we can get done on our budget. So first, we get all those guys done, and then we can make however many man-months worth of costumes. So we prioritize them all. So like, some guy's gonna be in Season mode and he's gotta wear a suit, and it looks stupid, well, that's one more model we have to make. And then there are things we want, we got some legends, we want, like, Hulk Hogan with a feather boa... so we kind of prioritize everything.

HF: So another big thing, especially with the transition to next-gen, is that we have four platforms now, so there's four versions of the model we have to make. In SmackDown! one, it took a week to make a character, and now it takes four weeks to make one character. Another costume for a character costs maybe half as much as a character, but... we'd love to have another costume, but we've only got a year, and we have to get done as much as we can.

TC: The models and roster changes we have are also a big issue. Another big issue we've got this year is that the commentary teams changed, and they're in kind of a weird state with us right now. We have this commentary system in the game, and it's based around two guys on each show, and they kind of talk back and forth. And then they say, "OK, we're changing to three guys!" And we've got to change the whole commentary system, and now we're not sure how the commentary system's going to line up. So that's a big issue this year.

How about letting players change the colors in the Create-a-wrestler mode, then?

CM: So, the real superstars? You mean, let the users do that? You'll have to talk to Vince [McMahon] about that. I don't think he'd let us do that. Another thing about the rosters is that every model has to be approved by the WWE, and they're very... you know, that's their business, is the characters. The characters have to look like they want them. So we do the characters, we say, we want the guy to look like this, but WWE will tell us, "No, it's gotta be like that, this is the costume to use." So that's their business, is having the characters be represented well. So we can't do stuff like let people modify the real superstars.