Bray Wyatt‘s WWE release in the summer of 2021 shocked the wrestling world and greatly affected the development of WWE 2K22.
WWE 2K Associate Lead Narrative Designer Andrea Listenberger recently sat down with WrestleZone Senior Editor Matt Black. While discussing the shocking release of Bray Wyatt, Listenberger revealed she was working for both 2K and WWE at the time as a member of the creative team.
“So, here’s a fun fact. Yes, on both counts [working for WWE and 2K],” Andrea Listenberger said. “Yeah, so, I was actually at that time… and everyone knew it. So, it was not a weird situation. Yeah, I was still working at that time, mostly for SmackDown. But it was the pandemic. So, it was weird. And I was working for 2K as well. Doing a little bit of both.
“Sure. Well, I remember exactly where I was when Bray had gotten released and the first reaction was, ‘Oh s*it!’ Because he… Yeah, it was a pretty big storyline. And we’re like, ‘We got to pivot. We got to figure out how we’re going to manage it. And we did. It was, but it honestly… It’s never fun to have to reconfigure a storyline.
“In terms of working him into [2K]25, we had actually tried to bring back the storyline previously. We had plans to bring it back in a much, much different way in 2K24. We had actually scheduled to record some new audio with Bray before his passing to use some of the existing cut scenes and, you know, put some new audio with it in a way that made sense for his character at the time.
“Obviously, things did not work out that way. He unfortunately passed far before his time, and that didn’t happen. And it didn’t make sense for us to just insert the storylines and you know, have a random Bray Wyatt storyline in MyRise. When we were working on the Island for 25, we started talking about having a Wyatt Sicks area.
“We didn’t have a super specific idea for what the story was going to be there. We started kicking around a few ideas. And out of that, started to come the idea for, ‘Is there something we can do with the Bray Wyatt… The Bray Wyatt footage. Especially, with what the Wyatt Sicks was doing on TV, how they were talking about Bray, how they were breaking the fourth wall. And from those sort of initial Bo Dallas, Uncle Howdy vignettes.
“The idea of doing something that only we could do in a video game and seeing if, ‘Do we want to break the fourth wall like they are doing on TV?’ That’s where the genesis for that idea came, and that’s kind of where the whole thing started.”
You can check out our complete interview with WWE 2K’s Andrea Listenberger in the embedded video below:
READ MORE: Lost Bray Wyatt WWE 2K22 MyRise Footage Revealed
What do you make of Andrea Listenberger’s comments? Where were you when Bray Wyatt was released from WWE in 2021? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
If you use any of these quotes, please credit WrestleZone with a link to this article for the transcription.
