Last week, video game maker THQ filed for bankruptcy.  To most of you, this news is completely irrelevant, but to me it immediately triggered a flood of memories from the summer of 2000.

My younger brother Pat and I took all of our old original Nintendo stuff and traded it in for two Nintendo 64 games, one called Perfect Dark and the other, made by THQ, called Wrestlemania 2000.

Neither of us were major wrestling fans, but the game was extraordinarily fun.  The main feature though, is that it allows you to edit any of the dozens of characters.  You can change the name, their moves, and most importantly, their appearance.  The result: an entire fleet of wrestlers from our own imaginations, including some inspired by real life.

Some were very simple, like taking The Rock, shrinking him down to a 5-foot-tall version and changing his name to The Pebble:

Others were more involved, but the ability to customize their face, hair and clothing from many options yielded some impressive look-alikes, such as Michael Jackson (one glove is not an option):

One thing we discovered is that if you set every option to 0, you end up with a crash dummy, which we naturally called Crash Dummy:

At the time, we created a guy named Jimmy Dean who today would clearly be called Ron Swanson:

Each of us had “our” guy we used when we played.  Mine is a giant, glasses-wearing, blue-haired behemoth named Dr. Pain, Ph.D.:

 My brother branched out a bit, but one of his main guys was Disco Stu:

There are so many others it would take me forever to post individually, so I’m going to just show them all in a nice little montage.  You’ll notice some thematically similar characters appearing together — we tried to give each guy a tag team partner.  Also note that some of the personas are complete inside jokes that will likely be incomprehensible.  Enjoy:

If you’ve never seen Michael Jackson hit Mr. Clean with a chair, you’re missing out.  And call me.  We can make this happen.