Jeff Jarrett: I’ll Never Forget The Look On Midway Games’ Faces When I Said I Wanted To Make Suicide A Real Wrestler

Jeff Jarrett reflects on the development process for TNA’s official video game, including telling the devs he would make Suicide real.

In late 2008, Midway Games would release the official TNA video game, TNA iMPACT!. The game would feature a litany of TNA stars, but also would create it’s own star, with Suicide as a character debuting in the game before becoming a real life character on TNA programming.

While speaking in a Dark Side Of The Ring Q and A in New York, Jeff Jarrett was asked about the development of the game, as well as if there were any plans for a second game to be released.

“The gaming industry, and I’m involved with Acclaim now, it was at a different time. If you’re a gamer, you know that if the gamers, shout out to y’all in the room, it was a real different time. The company, Midway Games approached us, and they really loved the brand and wanted to dial into it. When they dug in, hats off to them, they came actually to my house and sat down and we went into the DNA of kind of the creative process as you saw in the episodes. My wife was sick. I flew to California a couple of times. But that whole creative arc and process and if you remember, it’s one of, to me, kind of, I could talk forever on this because the character Suicide that was born in that game, I’ll never forget the look on their faces and I said, ‘hey man, I love this character. I want to make him into a real wrestler,’ and they were like, what the? That blew their minds. So that whole process, again, this is part of the episode, I’ll never forget. I could tell you, my wife was in ICU and I’m taking laps of walking to get out of the hospital and taking laps and doing calls, and I’ll never forget that phone call when the Midway executive said, ‘hey, so you won’t be on the next call,’ and he said it fast, and I said, ‘whoa, what’d you say?’ That was it. So that whole video game process, I loved it. I was immersed in it. They really dug in, got off, got successful, and if you know anything about it, Midway, not because of us. We were a success. They overextended. They went bankrupt, and so TNA (the game) 2 was on the books for years, and then the Hogan years happened and it all went to shit.”

Elsewhere in the same Q and A, Jarrett spoke about the origins of his ‘slap nuts’ catchphrase. You can read more about that here.

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