At 8 years old I was too young to actually have seen any “scary” movies, but I was certainly intrigued by them. This was the late 1980’s and Freddy Kruger mania was at an absolute fever pitch, coming of off a string of highly successful and equally schlocky sequels.

Every kid in my neighborhood knew about Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers even though none of us had been permitted to actually watch any of their movies; the knowledge of these characters and the movies that made them famous existed as a kind of suburban lore passed down from older brothers and absorbed through osmosis via tattered communal issues of Fangoria.

There was a 7-11 near my house that was a frequent Slurpee stop and it had a few arcades tucked way in the back (what a magical time…). One of the arcade machines was Splatterhouse. I was instantly intrigued. This took everything I was so curious about but was restricted from partaking in and made it into a dumb video game. My parents had no concept of video games, so every “video game” was just as innocent as the pong consoles they had messed around with in the 70’s, so I was always able to beg a quarter or two and enter the Splatterhouse.

By the time I was 12 I had become somewhat obsessed with scary movies, especially the glut of 80’s slasher flicks that flooded the huge Horror section of my local Acme Video. Our parents worked, so over the summer months I was charged with watching my brother who was four years my junior beginning the summer after I turned 12. To placate us, and to keep us from killing each other, my parents would let us rent movies. Acme Video’s 10 movies for 10 days for $10.99 opened the doors to the world of obscure horror movies.

Sometime before this I had graduated from my NES and “matured” into a Sega Genesis. I never really had too many Genesis games, but I did rent quite a few. One of my favorite perennial rentals was Splatterhouse 3. Everything about the game hit everyone of my spots- the blood, the violence, the beat ’em up gameplay… it was like a game made just for me.

There was a time when I did own the Sega Genesis version of Splatterhouse 3, but with my entire Genesis collection many years sold, I stumbled upon a shockingly cheap complete copy of the Mega Drive version, titled Splatterhouse Part 3. I actually imported a Mega Drive just to play this game that I purchased sight unseen. It was totally worth it.

I recently started getting into Human’s stellar Fire Pro Wrestling Series, specifically some of the Super Fire Pro Wrestling games.

Why these game were never ported to Super Nintendo and re-skinned by the WWF I have no idea. Instead we got a glut of mostly heinous and forgettable 16-bit wrestling games.

Shorty after completing work on the excellent Famicom Disk System title ‘Pro Wrestling” (which was later ported to the NES under the same name), game designer Masato Masuda left Nintendo’s R&D3 and joined TRY, which later became Human Entertainment. It was from within Human Entertainment that Masuda refined the wrestling video game thus birthing the FirePro Wrestling series, which is still releasing new games to this day.

The series includes entries for nearly every single video game console since the first Fire Pro Wrestling game, Fire Pro Wrestling Combination Tag was released for the PC Engine in 1989, with the most recent game being 2017’s Fire Pro Wrestling World which received a world wide release for the PS4.

The Super Famicom saw a whopping 8 Fire Pro titles released for it in the span of just 5 years. The series remained a Japanese exclusive series until the release of Fire Pro Wrestling for the Game Boy Advance in 2001.