Survivor Series used to be one of the biggest WWE events in any calendar year, one where big things would go down. It’s lost some of its luster over the past 10-15 years, but the company and its current Paul Levesque-led creative team may have found a way to claw some of it back.
As first reported by The Ringer, this year’s Survivor Series, which will take place at Boston’s TD Garden, will feature not one, but two WarGames matches.
“We’ll have a men’s WarGames match and a women’s WarGames match,” Levesque said to The Ringer. “The tradition of the Survivor Series has ebbed and flowed and changed slightly over time, but this will be similar to that.”
It also won’t be brand-driven, which is sure to please many fans who have called for the brand split to end.
“This will not be Raw versus SmackDown,” Levesque said. “It will be much more story-line driven.”
The WarGames match features two competing teams doing battle within two rings set inside an oversized steel cage. While the exact details haven’t always been the same over the years, the general idea is that the match begins with one wrestler from each team going at it, with a new combatant entering from alternating teams every few minutes.
Only once all members of both teams have entered can the match be won. There are no disqualifications, meaning weapons can and definitely do come into play. In the most recent incarnations of WarGames, in WWE’s NXT brand, every member of one team needed to be pinned or submitted to win, unless someone escaped the cage, which meant their team automatically lost.
The WarGames concept dates back to NWA in the late 1980s, and to date there have been more than three dozen of the matches. However, the vast majority of them took place before 2000, and all nine since 2017 have been held during NXT events, with the most recent occurring last December.
That will make the Survivor Series WarGames matches the first ever for the main WWE roster, and potentially the first time some fans who didn’t watch NXT are ever seeing them. They also really do fit the spirit of Survivor Series, which has traditionally had elimination-style matches between teams as part of its DNA.
Only now, as Levesque puts it, “We just upped the ante a little bit.” Most WWE fans would agree that Survivor Series could use that.