My, my, aren't you the brave one? This pleases me...First off, a little introduction...
My name is Bobo Fiendish, which I'm fairly certain you've already surmised, but I digress...
I was 'created' in 1992 by one Clarence P. Browne Jr. for use in the area of an imported Japanese videogame called 'Fire Pro Wrestling' which, sadly, due to the constraints of stringent copyright protection here in America that is not matched in Japan - specifically, the ability to copyright LIKENESSES - it could never be 'officially' released. This fine series of games included wrestlers from all promotions (Japanese, American, and Mexican) in an all-star selection that has yet to be equalled by any 'single-fed' videogame released, and as an added bonus, allowed you to create a wrestler of your very own to battle with the 'stars'.
Originally, due to space constraints on the SNES and TG-16 versions, my name was simply 'Dark Angel'... Believe you me, I have nothing against WCW's Vampiro (who, by the way, has stopped calling himself WCW's Dark Angel, though Mike Tenay still tries to sell it from time to time), John Cameron, or Metro3d Games, but I was the first official 'Dark Angel' EVER. I'm considering legal action regarding my nom de guerre, but considering I bear no likeness to any of those incarnations under my name, I doubt anything will come of it...
Moreover, it (unlike so very many American Wrestling Games released) was FUN. My likeness for the purpose of the game is as follows:
To say the least, I was NEVER a nice person. In the game I used a mix of high-impact power moves and submission style fighting... Frequently, my opponents would be steamrollered into unconsciousness, which pleased me. In the game, my finisher was an Argentine Backbreaker (aka Torture Rack) to a Backbreaker across the knee. Knockouts under the stress of such a terrible move were many.
This game was VERY successful and versions of it were released for every platform from the PC-Engine (TurboGraphix-16) to Super Famicom (SNES) to Sega Saturn to (most recently) Playstation. Rather than force players into a button mash that hopefully resulted in something happening that you wanted to happen, gameplay was TIGHT and based on TIMING (Japanese, it seems put more stock by skill than Americans, as any wrestling show - save perhaps ECW - makes painfully obvious). However, it was not a visually stunning game, since it used 2-D Sprites (and we wanted polygons and eye-candy lens-flare effects, never mind that 90% of the games WITH that special effect stuff use it to distract you from how CRAP the game is), so not many folks paid it much mind...
But those who DID, knew they had GOLD. There are plenty of sites and webrings dedicated to the various incarnations of Fire-Pro, so you shouldn't have too much trouble finding it. (And to help, I'll toss a few of them in the links page).
