WWE Bringing Back ‘War Games’ For The First Time in 19 Years

One of the most popular matches in wrestling history is finally making it’s return in November.

During the WWE NXT tapings on Wednesday night in Florida, NXT GM William Regal announced that the main event for the NXT TakeOver Houston show on November 18 will be a two-ring War Games bout. The announcement is expected to air on the November 1 edition of WWE NXT on the WWE Network.

The bout will consist of the NXT tag team champions SAnitY (Eric Young, Alexander Wolfe, and Killian Dain) defending their belts against Roderick Strong and The Authors of Pain, as well as The Undisputed Era (Adam Cole, Kyle O’Reilly, and Bobby Fish).

The TakeOver show will actually be subtitled “War Games,” and Triple H confirmed the fact via his Twitter page on Wednesday evening.

Interestingly, Triple H actually missed the NXT tapings this week at Full Sail University for the first time ever. He’s presently out of the country promoting WWE in India.

The War Games match style was originally created by Dusty Rhodes under the NWA banner. He was reportedly inspired after seeing Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The matches typically consisted of two teams with varying numbers of people, and they were always fought inside of a cage that encompassed two rings.

The match became the signature of the Four Horsemen in the 1980s, featuring several iconic matches with the legendary stable. Eventually, War Games became a yearly feature in WCW, with the bout usually featured as part of their September PPV show (Fall Brawl).

All in all, NWA/WCW held 30 traditional War Games matches over the years. The last one occurred on September 13, 1998 at WCW Fall Brawl and featured Team WCW (DDP, Roddy Piper, and the Ultimate Warrior) defeating Team nWo Hollywood (Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart, and Stevie Ray) and Team nWo Wolfpac (Kevin Nash, Sting, and Lex Luger).

If you’re going to go back and watch some classic War Games matches to get ready for NXT TakeOver, though, we would recommend scrolling a little further back on the WWE Network. Don’t start with Fall Brawl 1998. Watch pretty much of any of the War Games matches between 1987 and the early 1990s; virtually all of them during that time period are incredible.