“Macho” Mike Haggar

Height: 6’7″
Weight: 309 lbs.
Hometown: Metro City, USA
Finisher: The Pothole Plugger
Video Game: Saturday Night Slam Masters, Ring of Destruction: Slam Masters 2, Final Fight 1-3, Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds

I’m not that big a gamer, but being a huge wrestling fan I always made sure to play every wrestling video game I could get my hands on. While this feature won’t go in depth about certain wrestling games, for that you have Joe Gagne’s Funtime Pro Wrestling Arcade, I will highlight some of the more popular fictional wrestling characters in video game culture. First up, the former Mayor of Metro City, “Macho” Mike Haggar.

With Triple H and Stephanie McMahon having been the main antagonists on WWE TV within the last year, it’s only fitting that the initial video game wrestler to be covered on A Winner is You is one of the baddest authoritative figures in video game history. A trailblazer of sorts, as the Mayor of Metro City Haggar led the way for other former wrestlers to get into politics. Former Governor of Minnesota, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, was clearly a fan of Saturday Night Slam Masters.

In Final Fight, Haggar was ridding the streets of crime with his trusty metal pipe. Much the
same way Triple H used his sledgehammer to rid the WWE of potential threats to his
main event spot. You could play as Haggar in the side scroller dishing out double lariats to Mad Gear cronies left and right, and piledriving the hell out of of multiple versions of another notable video game wrestling grappler, Hugo Andore.

Haggar took his moveset into the ring in Saturday Night Slam Masters, adopting the “Macho” gimmick that had made Randy Savage a superstar. Going as far as hoisting his daughter Jessica onto his shoulder after winning, the same way Savage used to do with Miss Elizabeth. He made his spinning piledriver his finisher and gave it a very wrestling appropriate name: The Pothole Plugger. He even tagged with Alexander The Grater, the  mandatory Vader look-a-like that every wrestling video game in the 90’s was required to have.

A stalwart of the Capcom franchise, Haggar applied his grappling trade to other games like Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds. A seizure inducing, lucha libre inspired game consisting of two out of three falls, trios matches. Sadly, Zangief wasn’t in the game leaving gamers to ponder who the better wrestler was. And who’s piledriver was better?

While other fictional wrestling characters have been brought to life thanks to Japanese wrestling, not one Japanese wrestling organization made an attempt to throw Don Frye, or even Dan Severn, in a pair of army green pants and a Sam Browne belt. The closest we got was Zangief having an alternate Mike Haggar attire in Street Fighter IV, but that was also a video game.