It's been quite a while, hasn't it?
Fictional League Pro Wrestling has always been a side project of mine. It started out as a YouTube show using footage from WWF No Mercy for the Nintendo 64 to piece together wrestling cards and story lines, which sadly cannot be seen today as it was deleted from my main YouTube channel without any backups existing anymore. After that, it was taken to the next level when WWE 2K16 was released and I picked up a copy of it in the early summer of 2016. From there, the Twitch live streams as we know them now were born: beginning with the first ever FLPW Single-Elimination Tournament where Eddie Chumbo defeated Tyler T-Man in the grand finals.
My interest with keeping up with streaming FLPWLive waned over time as cracks began to form with the game itself. There wasn't a ton I could do to enhance story lines, and said story lines were completely at the mercy of whether or not the AI happened to be smart that match or not. This led to infamous moments such as the then undefeated Salty Marcellus vacated the National U.S. Championship of America, moved on to the world title division, the proceeded to lose every match making himself and the rest of the U.S. division look really bad.
You can see the decline for yourself if you go waaayyy back in this blog's archives to around late October 2016 where I gave up writing the Wrap-Up articles and only really used the site for posting the fight cards before the streams - a thing I was already using the FLPW Twitter account for.
Fast forward to now, and I've never been more excited to go back to working on possibly the most ambitious pet-project I've ever worked on.
If you haven't caught it yet, there was a stream last Friday (which you can watch here). With 40 wrestlers currently signed to the FLPW, there were an extra eight wrestlers who couldn't participate. What ended up happening was that 24 wrestlers that exemplified the best of the FLPW got invites to participate in the tournament. This includes the likes of two-time World's Bestest Champion of the World Chris Furious, 2-Time International Canadian Champion of the World Johnny Talladega, all the previous tournament winners, and so on and so on.
I'm not going to go into a whole "Wrap-Up" article here (since you really should click the link and watch it yourself before day one of the tournament tomorrow ), but this tournament is shaping up to be the biggest event in the history of the FLPW.
You see, this marks the end of an era for the FLPW. That malaise that was brought on by being upset with the limitations of WWE 2K16 is going to be remedied - we're going to be finally moving on from a now six-year old video game. After poking around to see what offerings, we're moving things to WWE 2K19. This jump alone will allow us to have much more flexibility with match offerings, improved AIs that actually make triple threat matches fun to watch, and better customization to help bring the characters to the next level.
This is a sendoff to where the FLPW truly began. And with the World Championship being vacated and title being awarded to the winner of the tournament, it's also going to show who will lead the torch into the future. Will Chris Furious once again remain the main guy of the FLPW? Will someone totally new to the World title division take it?
The whole tournament will be capped off one week from now on Monday September 27th for Show of the Masters 2021, with the first two matches being the semi finals, and the main event featuring the grand finals to see who will be the World's Bestest going into the new era of FLPW.
Day 1 of the tournament will begin tomorrow (September 21st, 2021) at 7:00pmEST, and continue every other day this week. I hope to see you there to help celebrate the end of an era!
