In The Right Hands, A Nintendo Entertainment System Can Be A Weapon

In these trying times, when everyone is arguing over the exponentially growing price tag for an obelisk to play the latest video games and whether that price is worth 14 stacks before AI plunges the entertainment industry into the technological Ides of March, professional wrestling—ever the purveyor of what we should all be focusing on—dared to answer a question no one thought to ask: Can a console be used as a weapon? Yes. 

On Sunday, June 28, All Elite Wrestling hosted Forbidden Door at the SAP Center in San Jose, California. The pay-per-view—whose name is a nod to the once-sacrosanct phenomenon where promotions would never intermingle—was truly a wrestling event where everyone was there. There were wrestlers from Japan’s World Wonder Ring Stardom and New Japan Pro Wrestling, Mexico’s Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL), hell, even Sonic The Hedgehog was there. But the real star of the night of the four-and-a-half-hour (and some-change) pay-per-view wasn’t the wrestlers; it was the Nintendo Entertainment System.

One of Forbidden Door’s “triple main events” was a ten-man tag team match inside of a newly fangled cylindrical steel cage, dubbed “Death’s Door.” This match is what I’d affectionately call AEW’s mandated Looney Tunes match for sickos where anything that could happen did. Men were flapjacked onto a bed of thumbtacks, had oranges squeezed into their open wounds, and had a backpack explode in their face, careening them off the top of the cage onto a two-tier stacked table. But the spot that got the loudest pop from the crowd wasn’t any of the above; it was when a wrestler upped the ante by pulling out an NES and started using it as a weapon.  

“He’s got a Nintendo!”

The wrestler we have to thank for Nintendo’s console making an appearance at Forbidden Door was Kyle O’Reilly. And boy howdy, did O’Reilly get every imaginable use out of the NES as a blunt-force object. Out of the many ways O’Reilly inflicted pain on his adversaries with the retro Nintendo console, the one detail I’m especially tickled by wasn’t him blowing on the cartridge before inserting it (of course) into the NES and bashing it into Kyle Fletcher’s bald head, nor was it Tony Schiavone begging O’Reilly to “bring us back to the 80s with Donkey Kong” on commentary. My favorite part was the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail of the rectangular controller being wrapped in barbed wire. Turns out that makes it even more effective as a weapon when used as a nunchuck. 

Hopefully, Nintendo’s legion of fun-hating lawyers don’t catch wind of the extracurricular use of their retro console and give AEW grief for it. Instead, they should take it as a compliment to how timelessly versatile their hardware is.

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