WCW vs. nWo: 9 Underground is a ROM hack of WCW vs. nWo - World Tour, created by RagDas. In his own words:
Here's my second ROM hack of WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, titled "WCW vs. nWo: 9 Underground". This time around, it's quite simple to summarize what was achieved: 9 wrestlers, as the name suggests, have been added to the playable roster without removing anyone from the existing roster. It is known among a few people who have explored ROM hacking World Tour that the moveset and params data for entire playable roster of VPW64 is contained within World Tour, though for characters that didn't make the final roster of World Tour, their movesets are in various states of completion. This hack has taken 9 of these incomplete characters and given them full functionality, though there are caveats that we'll get into in the next sections.
The big caveat, that I will attempt to repeat at least one more time in this README, is that while this is a ROM hack, it does *not* run on console. Due to the highly experimental nature of what was done, this possibility was always there, but that's the price to be paid when trying something for the first time. Please DO NOT buy this on a cartridge, you will literally be throwing your money away. That's true for other ROM hacks, but especially true for this one. Consider that your only warning (aside from the literal opening screen of the hack) with regard to that particular consideration.
That aside, as always, no real theme to the hack. Main focus here is that we learned how to add new characters without removing any characters, and some other discoveries were made in VPW64 that I saw fit to backport (side port? laterally port?) into World Tour.
Features
Continuing from RagDas' readme:
62 animations were imported from VPW64 to accommodate the following:
- Liger has his shoutei, koppo kick, and stalling superplex
- Mascaras has his taunt and flying cross chop
- Dos Caras has his taunt and the same flying cross chop that Mil does; also fixed his back finisher (pump handle powerbomb pin; the animation he used was glitched, but the move exists normally so that was an easy fix)
- Chono has his 'angry stomp' for his face down grounded opponent strike
- Muta has his poison mist (though there is no mist texture/mechanism in World Tour, so it's invisible), rear naked choke, elbow drop, ippon seoi nage (and reversal), and taunt
- Terry Funk has his taunt, punching combination finisher, and spinning toehold
- Dory Funk Jr. has his taunt, running elbow (a la Misawa), finisher (armlock suplex pin?), and the aforementioned spinning toehold
New Characters
Here's who I added, and which stable they're in:
- Andy the Gigant (Andre the Giant) - WCW
- Chono (Masahiro Chono) - nWo
- Bad Blood (Great Muta) - nWo
- Danny Fang Jr. (Dory Funk Jr. ) - DoA
- Major Tom (Terry Funk) - DoA
- Abispa (Jushin Thunder Liger) - IU
- Le Masquerade (Mil Mascaras) - IU
- Dosquerade (Dos Caras) - IU
- The Discloser (The Destroyer) - WWW
Caveats
More words from RagDas:
Here's a list of things you should know about what I chose to do that you may disagree with/should read to understand why I made the decisions I made:
- The championship text is now slightly shorter for each championship because that's what created space for the 9 wrestlers in the first place (e.g. instead of "World Heavyweight Championship" for the WWW Heavyweight league, it'll just say "WWW Champion")
- While I did successfully manage to add 9 wrestlers, they needed appearance data to come from *somewhere*. Thus, you'll notice a lot of the nWo folks in street gear; that's because for a number of them (and Rick Steiner), their costume data ended up being donated for each of the 9 additions. I was particular about how I distributed this - for example, Hogan, Nash, and Hall all share the black jeans + nWo t-shirt combination because they all have the same skin tone and use the same height value (20). Consolidating them to one costume freed two costume slots that would then go to two of the added wrestlers, if you can believe it.
- Similarly, for head data, seeing as Hayabusa and Super Delphin didn't need the heads that you can't access anyway, all of their head defs went to the 9 characters (and Black Tiger II, come to think of it)
- Black Tiger II remains chunky because I know that's what AKI was planning; his unmasked texture is still Johnny Ace in honor of whatever it was they were trying to pull
- I used everyone's false name from WCW vs. The World for consistency with the existing roster; again, this wasn't about making the game more accurate to real life, but more about consistency with context. For characters like Dory Funk Jr., Dos Caras, and The Destroyer, all of whom never appeared in WCW vs. The World, I used a transliterated version of their VPW64 name. Do consider that renaming everyone to their actual name would also necessitate redoing their portraits (e.g. for Great Sasuke, whose picture is literally of a black ninja). This is not something I was willing to do.
- All the added characters have AKI's placeholder question mark portrait for additional characters (more on that in the next section); I didn't have space for drawing new portraits, nor did I want to to draw new portraits.
- I haven't changed anyone in the base roster's moveset to be more accurate because the budget for new anims went to making the added characters complete.
Some characters were swapped out for others. Here's a list of the replacements:
- Shawn Michaels replaces Eric Bischoff
- Stone Cold replaces Buff Bagwell
- Undertaker replaces Scott Norton
- Bret Hart replaces Tiger Jeet Singh
- Ken Shamrock replaces Chris Benoit
- Andre the Giant replaces Fake Sting
- Rickson Gracie replaces Shunji Takano
- Dr. Death 'replaces' Koji Kitao (this is a reskin; Kitao already used Dr. Death's moveset)
For more information, please check the included README file.
Downloads
- Release 1 (June 25th, 2025)
Patching
The patch for this ROM hack is in .xdelta format, and expects to
be patched on an unmodified WCW vs. nWo - World Tour ROM,
NTSC-U v1.1 (or "Revision A") in Z64 format.
Patching instructions are similar to what you'd do for VPW2 freem Edition, SUMMIT, or WCW/nWo REVENJI.
Base ROM Information
Information on the unpatched, unmodified World Tour NTSC-U v1.1/Revision A ROM in Z64 format:
- ROM size: 12.0 MB (12,582,912 bytes)
- CRC32 hash:
A74DA07A - MD5 hash:
B7A220B59303D47F3BEAE233CA868CFD - SHA-1 hash:
60814FB3AD2DD206BADBEEE47C07636357DD0D7E - CRC ROM checksum hashes:
71BE60B9 1DDBFB3C
Patched ROM Information
ROM information after patching with La Fin Du Tour:
- ROM size: 12.0 MB (12,582,912 bytes)
- CRC32 hash:
111BCE9D - MD5 hash:
BE66CE406E5C07633C3CDF4B8CA43152 - SHA-1 hash:
4936CD0718D4DF176190EF377DC397483BAEA076 - CRC ROM checksum hashes:
8CBA15BF E6951D5D