Aubrey Edwards is not only AEW’s most popular referee, she’s also one of the heads of the AEW Games department.
On the latest edition of the AEW Unrestricted podcast Edwards spoke about her latest project, AEW: Rise To The Top, a new mobile game that is set to drop later this month.
So, at the time this (podcast) releases, I am literally days away from releasing another video game technically. If you’ve been to an AEW live event, you’ve probably seen a video of Ricky Starks talking about pre-registering, pre-ordering for various iPhone or Android app called for AEW: Rise to the Top and it’s actually our newest mobile game and I’ve been working on it for over a year now at this point and it’s really great. It’s been developed by these guys, East Side Games. They’re based in Vancouver so it’s really great having meetings with people in the same time zone. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. But they’ve been experts in what’s called the idol game genre. If you’ve ever played the Trailer Park game Boys or any of the RuPaul Drag Race games, they’ve been doing those. So they’ve got this down to a science and then on top of that, the team they have involved is just so into wrestling. It seems silly because you would think, oh! If you’re making a wrestling game, you definitely are fans of wrestling. Not always a guarantee. Sometimes you end up getting an I.P. that you’re working with and you know nothing about.
Edwards later reveals that the lead writer of the game is a graduate from the legendary Stu Hart Dungeon.
To have people that were already interested in wrestling that essentially pitched this game to AEW Games and we worked out the I.P. agreement, the lead writer on the game, Jamie (Henwood), she’s this awesome gal, she graduated from Stu Hart’s Dungeon. So, she understands wrestling. A lot of what I do for AEW Games is just a lot of I.P. approval type stuff. Just making sure our brand is represented in the best way possible given the confines of whatever the media is. So, I review all of the script, I oversee all of the art approvals, any sort of use of our logo and branding. All of that stuff kind of has to go through me and it’s been really great reading a script and not having to completely rewrite things because they understand character voices and how (Chris) Jericho says something is going to be different than the way Britt Baker says something and everybody has their catchphrases. It’s one of those games that I’ve been extremely proud to work on. Now we’ve been in test market for a couple of months which basically means we’re in smaller countries with smaller user base is just kind of putting some money into advertising here and there, seeing how the game performs, being able to tweak it, change some design stuff to make it more stickier and just make sure that when we do hit that worldwide release on January 17th that the game performs and is as good as possible so everybody downloading it that day has an awesome experience and I’m just really, really excited because shipping a video game is one of the hardest things you can do. It feels like a full-body experience. There’s an amazing quote from this guy who does this comic, Penny Arcade, that says, ‘No one likes to see sausage-making because it’s overall just like a really disgusting concept but the idea of making a game is the process of making sausage out of yourself,’ and I’ve never heard something more accurate. So that’s one of the many, many things that I’ve been working on and January 17th, available on iOS and Android worldwide, you can download AEW: Rise to the Top.
You can check out the full AEW Unrestricted podcast, which had Scott Garland as a special guest, below.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)