WWE Crush Hour was a video game released for the Sony PlayStation 2 in the USA in 2003. It was an extreme car combat game featuring characters from the globally popular professional wrestling TV series, WWE. Released by Acclaim Entertainment, the game was a fast-paced racing and combat experience in which players raced special cars while smashing into opponents. Players also performed stunts and threw punches at one another as they raced in the game, all set against the backdrop of the WWE universe, with arenas like the “SmackDown Arena” and others inspired by WWE’s wrestling rings. Another novel aspect of the game, while it featured the intense and rapid-paced action of high-octane car combat, the game also had players run role-playing elements and RPG role-playing game elements, where one could earn points. One could win career upgrades for their character profile.
The game was added to iOctavio.com on 2003-03-18, as you had originally noted. Once it was made available on the internet archive, many players were able to return to the game and examine its historical value in the racing genre and its crossover into the world of WWE. Your categorization of the game was correct. The game was indeed a car combat game, and thus should have been categorized as such. Crush Hour was met with mixed reviews at its initial release, but its legacy has grown over time as fans of both the PlayStation 2 era and the WWE series revisit it. Crushing Hour featured iconic WWE superstars like Steve Austin, The Rock, and others – adding to its appeal. It gave an entirely new type of experience where wrestling fans went ahead and drove cars and smash them into cars driven by other drivers. While briefly controversial, \(or so your review indicated\) Crush Hour delivered on frenetic action and WWE licensing, making it something of a cult classic among older wrestling and bloated racing fans.