Ahmed Johnson reflects on his two experiences being part of WWE video games.
Ahmed Johnson was a part of two of WWE's video games during the New Generation Era. “WWF War Zone” and “WWF In Your House,” released in 1996 and 1998 respectively, were WWE’s first major forays into the fifth-generation video game consoles being released on the original Sony PlayStation. Both games were drastically different in terms of gameplay with In Your House being a direct sequel to “WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game” and War Zone was the first attempt at a fully 3D wrestling game from WWE.
Ahmed Johnson was one of a handful of wrestlers to be included in both video games. Unlike the video game rosters in the modern era, back in 1996, only a select number of competitors were able to be included in the video games, and royalties were not as Grand back in those days either, according to Ahmed Johnson.
Speaking to Gregory Iron on the Iron-On Wrestling podcast, Ahmed Johnson says royalty checks for the video games were less than 3% of sales at the time, but he did say that he had fun doing the motion capture for the games.
“Well, no royalties back then in our game, we only got two-point-something percent of the game so it was nothing, it was a waste of time really,” said Johnson. “But making the games were fun, when they flew us in, put us on the green screen, and put the little dots on us, like lightbulb things, and making the game was fun, man. Then, to see it all come together at the end, it was great.”
Ahmed Johnson would never be in another video game after 1998 but he will live on forever via his two outings and can take solace in the fact that he was in the exact same number of WWE video games as Limp Bizkit frontman, Fred Durst.
Johnson, elsewhere in the podcast, named which two competitors he would like to wrestle from today's WWE roster. Learn more here.