The History of Total Extreme Wrestling

Total Extreme Wrestling 2005 (TEW 2005) was released on October 6, 2005 under Grey Dog Software. A demo was also released in advance on September 29, 2005, allowing the user to play one game month just like previous demos. TEW 2005 included some more new features. Advance booking was one example which helped to promote upcoming big events. Televised shows also improved, bringing both competition to the shows with non-wrestling shows along with multiple television deals around the world for one show. The pay-per-view feature was now very similar to television in that there's now a list of pay-per-view providers which the user must make a deal with to get their pay-per-view provided. A momentum meter was also added to the wrestlers to bring in more realism in that if they give great matches, cut good interviews and participate in angles, it will increase and thus gain more overness. This helped to prevent the user from booking the same over people all the time and expect good ratings. The booking also improved in that the match purpose feature from EWR has returned and enhanced. The user must now talk to road agents about how the match has to be set up, including ways of putting people over, burying a worker and the way an actual match needs to be performed. TEW 2005 also made more features customizable with its new editable statistics for angles, storylines, locations and injuries. Its angle editor consisted of many different types such as interviews to beatdowns to celebrations and uses up to six people to participate in various roles. The storyline editor takes these angles and places them in an order the booker will need to comply to. The storyline editor was created by Phil Parent, using Georges Polti's book The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations as an inspiration. Also included was the "grades" feature. Instead of having an exact view of the stats each wrestler has along with changes, a more realistic grade feature was instead added to make the user rely on instinct for crucial decisions.


Total Extreme Wrestling 2007 (TEW 2007) was officially released on December 29, 2006, with a number of new features. Whereas both TEW2004 and TEW2005 were written from scratch, TEW 2007 was being built on top of TEW 2005's source code. There were many new features, such as the ability to customise merchandise and a large amount of new contract types (short-term, etc.).
Total Extreme Wrestling 2008

A new installment of the series, Total Extreme Wrestling 2008 (TEW 2008), was announced on the Grey Dog Software website on January 1, 2008. The game is largely based on TEW 2007, but Ryland made more than 100 changes and additions. The game allows players to import and convert their TEW 2007 databases. The game was released on June 7, 2008. The demo for the game was released on June 1, 2008.

In late 2009, it was announced that Total Extreme Wrestling 2010 (TEW 2010) would be released in early 2010. Some of the new features announced included a revamp of backstage morale, and several changes to improve the interface and to reduce the amount of time it takes to navigate through the game and to book a show.

Total Extreme Wrestling 2013

At the end of July, it was announced that Total Extreme Wrestling 2013 (TEW 2013) would be released in December 2012. Some of the new features announced included an Autobooker, Fog Of War, Tribute Shows, Shoot Interviews, Legacies, and several other changes to help either make the game more realistic, and opened up more options in the database

Total Extreme Wrestling 2013 was released on December 16, 2012, with the demo version available on December 9.


Total Extreme Wrestling 2020

On December 8, 2018, it was announced that Total Extreme Wrestling 2020 (TEW 2020) is in development with an estimate release of April 2020. The announcement stated that Ryland had completely rewritten the code before reinserting older features to make the game "effectively a much sharper, quicker, more intuitive, better quality piece of work" and promised that TEW 2020 would be "the biggest jump forward in terms of quality the series has ever seen".

The developer's journal, beginning on the day of the announcement, was split into multiple phases, the first phase being announcements of new and returning features which had already been added beginning December 10, 2018 and ending July 12, 2019, while the second phase, which began July 29, 2019 and is currently ongoing, is a "live" journal discussing features currently being worked on and the current level of completion of the default game world, "The Cornellverse". Some of the highly-requested features added include playing as a company's developmental territory and giving the player more control over house shows.

Another feature introduced was that of attributes, replacing the old "personality" and "lifestyle" systems. In an interview with My Games Lounge, Ryland said that "it was nice to do a spring clean of the code" as re-writing the code is what allowed him to add so many new features.