Xavier Woods is no stranger to appearing in WWE video games, but soon he will be a playable character in something very different.
Many fans may groan and roll their eyes when Vince McMahon refers to WWE as sports entertainment, but on many levels, it is hard to argue with. Avoiding the phrase professional wrestling altogether is a little ridiculous but when you look at how many worlds WWE has a foot in, it really is a lot more than that. Yes, it's a sport, but it is also heavily linked with television, film, music, and gaming.
That last one, gaming, is something that isn't discussed enough. WWE has had a long relationship with video games. From the wrestling arcade games of the 1980s, to the likes of No Mercy on the Nintendo 64 and the SmackDown series on PlayStation, to the WWE 2K games of today. Nowadays though it isn't just wrestling based games that wrestling is involved with.
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Many of WWE's current Superstars are avid gamers, but none more so than Xavier Woods. The New Day member has his own YouTube channel dedicated to gaming, UpUpDownDown, which has over 1.5 million subscribers. Clearly, Konami is a big fan of Woods and his channel as the company has included the former Tag Team Champion as a playable character in the latest installment of one of its most famous series.
The news, broken by Konami on Twitter, is that Woods has been immortalized as a playable character on the latest Bomberman game, Super Bomberman R. Konami is "beyond fired up" to have Woods on board, and obviously, the WWE Superstar is pretty excited about it himself. Seeing yourself as a Bomberman character must be a pretty cool feeling.
Woods isn't the only pro wrestler to be heavily involved in a classic gaming series recently. Kenny Omega portrayed a character in the latest trailer for the new Street Fighter game. Ironically that character is called Cody, and the in-game version of him looks remarkably like The Cleaner's wrestling nemesis, Cody Rhodes. That amusing detail likely wasn't lost on Omega. Who's news is bigger though? Woods in Bomberman or Omega as a Street Fighter character?