While many fans continue to bemoan and belittle WCW for its final few years of mediocrity, the promotion has a slew of cool and unique concept matches that helped separate the company from the competition. Sometimes the concepts were silly (re: Monster Truck Sumo Match), but more often than not, the idea helped to make WCW the great promotion that it was.
WWE hasn’t adopted any of these concepts just yet, but perhaps one day they will. From Battlebowl to The Doomsday Cage and all points in between, here are some of the most unique WCW ideas you might have forgotten about.
10 Battlebowl
What’s better than a battle royal? How about two of them taking place at the same time? WCW called the match Battlebowl and it took place during Starrcade ‘91 and 92 before being its own event in 1993. The rules were simple if not convoluted. In the double-ring battle royal, 20 men waged war. The match starts in ring one and competitors would toss each other into ring two where the match would continue. If you hurled them out of ring one into anywhere but ring two, it didn’t count. Eventually one man would be left in each ring and they’d come together to try and dump each other out to win the match.
9 The Lethal Lottery
To get into The Battlebowl, WCW Superstars had to first qualify by winning their match in the Lethal Lottery. Throughout the evening, stars would have their names drawn at random in pairs to set up tag teams at random to square off. The winners of each tag match would advance to the Bowl.
Sometimes, you might get lucky and be paired up with your traditional partner, a friend, or at least a fellow babyface/heel. Other times, you’d have to do your best to put up with your mortal enemy to try and win your qualifying match.
8 World War 3
Often times, a traditional Battle Royal would be 20 Superstars. Take that and multiply it by three, add two more rings and you get World War 3. Over the course of the event, the rules changed slightly.
The first event was a traditional battle royal with 30 guys in each ring, once the field was down from 60 to 30 everyone would congregate into the center ring to finish the match. In later years, eliminations were able to take place just by leaving the ring, even if was through the second or bottom rope. In the 1998 event, pinfalls and submissions were allowed. The action was obviously too much for one announce team to call, so there was one team per ring calling the action.
7 WCW All-Nighters
Long before streaming and the WWE Network, it wasn’t always easy to pay for every single PPV from both companies. WCW also was able to make use of being owned by a television company and find a way to combine witty repartee between the likes of Tony Schiavone, Bobby Heenan, and Mene Gene while showcasing the best of WCW PPVs and Clashes as All-Nighters.
The announce team would have a “sleepover” while watching great WCW matches. If WWE grabbed some of their content, paired up frenemies like Corey Graves and Byron Saxton while they watch old school WWE on FS1, perhaps they’d be able to garner some more fans.
6 Road Wild
Another unique WCW PPV was Road Wild. Outdoor PPVs always help the unique feel and this one is no different. Taking place in The Black Hills of Sturgis, South Dakota during the biggest motorcycle rally in the world. The roar of thousands upon thousands of engines gives the event an interesting sound from the crowd.
The event was also housed some major moments in WCW history - Hogan winning the title and spray-painting it with the nWo happened during Road Wild. The match seems silly now, but there was also a lot of mainstream hype in Jay Leno teaming up with DDP against Hogan and Bischoff.
5 Spring Break Nitros
When Eric Bischoff started Nitro, he specifically looked for unique ways to make Monday Nitro stand apart from Raw. One of those ways was during Spring Break, taking the show out of the arenas and coming to hot Spring Break locations like Daytona Beach, Florida. The outdoor atmosphere is always special. But toss in Spring Break partygoers, pools, and scantily-clad Nitro Girls all helped to make sure fans knew they had to attend these Nitro parties.
4 Scaffold Match
Hell in a Cell or the Elimination Chamber is considered dangerous to mainstream wrestling audiences. But there are several matches that have taken place in other promotions across the world far more dangerous. The NWA and WCW had back to back Starrcades, including “The Sky Walkers” featuring the dreaded Scaffold Match.
The big plus about adding a Scaffold Match to the WWE’s list of match types is that you wouldn’t have this kind of lunacy every week or month and from a booking perspective, you would need a real reason for two enemies to wage war atop an arena.
3 The Bunkhouse Stampede
When the NWA came into WWE’s backyard in 1988 for the Bunkhouse Stampede, it was considered a declaration of war. But the real war took place in the confines of a steel cage. Nine men (Barbarian, Warlord, Ivan Koloff, Lex Luger, Animal, Arn, Tully, and Dusty Rhodes) arrived in street clothes to brawl for a million dollars.
The only event to air on PPV was housed inside a Steel Cage. Yes, a bloody battle royal that took place inside of a cage! While most steel cages matches, escaping over the top or through the door would be the way to win, here it was the way to be eliminated!
2 Partnership With Other Promotions
Thanks to a partnership with NJPW, WCW took part in three separate supershows with the second event being New Japan's first January 4th supershow which would become a yearly tradition for the Japanese wrestling company.
New Japan wasn’t the only promotion WCW partnered up with. Worlds Collide was a joint PPV production with AAA in Mexico. These events helped WCW to get out of its own bubble and truly feel like a global promotion,’paving the way for Eric Bishoff to recruit talent from both Japan and Mexico to make their product unique and appealing.
1 The Doomsday Cage
Designed to annihilate Hulkamania, The Doomsday Cage made its debut at Uncensored 1996. The match itself was not all that great but the spectacle of the massive cage could have and should have made more appearances. The match started at the top of the three-tiered cage and Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage had to fight their way against both The Four Horsemen and The Dungeon Of Doom.