WWE 2K24 will celebrate 40 years of Wrestlemania

2K Games dropped its first trailer for WWE 2K24 today, confirming several important details ahead of its March 5 launch, with the game also serving as a celebration of 40 years of WWE’s WrestleMania event.

As such, WWE 2K24‘s central Showcase mode will cover the most iconic matchups in WrestleMania history. Although it doesn’t name any examples, 2K’s announcement does reference Hulk Hogan chokeslamming Andre the Giant and the “match for the ages” between Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker, so I expect players will get to recreate these matches.

The game will also introduce four new match types—Special Guest Referee, Ambulance Match, Casket Match, and Gauntlet Match—while improving upon returning ones. Royal Rumble matches, for instance, will now allow for eight online players in 30-Superstar online matches.

Pre-orders are already live for the title, and if all you care about is the standard version of the game, it’s $59.99 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but $69.99 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. There are naturally more expensive versions you can pre-order that come with extra content, but surprisingly, all digital pre-order bundles also throw in the standard edition of last year’s game, WWE 2K23. That way, you can play the current iteration straight away while you wait for WWE 2K24.

WWE 2K24 will look to keep up the series’ track record in terms of quality. After how disastrously buggy and broken WWE 2K20 was, 2K and developer Visual Concepts decided to skip releasing a WWE 2K21 to instead give WWE 2K22 extra development time. It seemed to work, with that game seeing a far more positive critical reception, and WWE 2K23 kept the momentum going.

The PC version should ideally be of top quality too. At the very least, it’d be disappointing if it turned out like NBA 2K24’s PC port, which was plagued with technical issues. 2K’s parent company Take-Two Entertainment has also come under fire lately for the NBA 2K series’ microtransaction model, even being hit with a lawsuit over it.