24 Facts About Mat Dickie

Mat Dickie creates indie professional wrestling games, such as Wrestling Revolution for iOS and Android devices, which received over 100,000 downloads two months after its launch in 2012.

Mat Dickie came out of retirement in late 2011 and transitioned to mobile game development, which led to the release of Wrestling Revolution in 2012.

In 2019, Mat Dickie confirmed that a new wrestling project was in development for the Nintendo Switch and mobile devices.

Many of Mat Dickie's games are infamous for their awkward controls and poor graphics.

Mat Dickie has mentioned that the low resolution and low poly graphics in his games have allowed for better performance, in turn enabling him "to push a lot of boundaries".

Mat Dickie's parents worked on a small newsstand, where he stayed while they worked, and boredom drove him to express his creativity by producing makeshift toys for himself with the materials available there.

Mat Dickie attended Brigg Primary School and Franklin College in Grimsby.

Mat Dickie became interested in developing games at an early age, often sketching out ideas for games.

Mat Dickie tinkered with Deluxe Paint on his Commodore Amiga until he acquired a PC in 1998, which signalled the beginning of his game development career.

Mat Dickie began creating his first game after he stumbled across a copy of DIV Game Studio, a programming language that promised to make game development easy.

Mat Dickie purchased it from his local Woolworths branch, and spent the summer of 2000 learning it from the examples.

Mat Dickie released his first game, Hardy Boyz Stunt Challenge, in August 2000.

Mat Dickie moved to Manchester in 2001 to complete a Bachelor of Science in video games and computers at the University of Salford.

In 2007, Mat Dickie created his first major non-wrestling game, Hard Time, a prison simulator which was named by Games for Windows Magazine as the "Indie Game of the Month".

Mat Dickie was looking forward to develop his wrestling brand with them; however, they felt it was a conflict of interest.

Mat Dickie released The You Testament in early 2009, a game loosely based on the New Testament in which the player follows the life and times of Jesus Christ and his various miracles.

Mat Dickie subsequently became a developer of educational software, which he published on TES.

Mat Dickie had ambitions of enhancing learning and making learning fun; however, he later came to the conclusion that entertainment did not have much of a role to play in education.

In early 2012, Mat Dickie was unemployed, about to buy his first home and awaiting the birth of his first child; this motivated him to come out of retirement and move to developing mobile games, releasing Wrestling Revolution as his first major mobile game.

Mat Dickie released several 2D remakes of his classic PC games on mobile, such as Popscene in 2014, Wrecked, and Hard Time in 2017.

In July 2018, Mat Dickie announced his retirement from full-time game development, citing "frightening intolerance" from digital retailers among other reasons.

In 2019, Mat Dickie confirmed that a new wrestling project was in development for the Nintendo Switch and mobile devices.

Mat Dickie thus decided to release Wrestling Empire in its unfinished state and add additional features through regular updates.

The game has been described as reminiscent of wrestling games on the Nintendo 64, which Mat Dickie drew inspiration from, specifically the era's focus on "gameplay over graphics", which he believes fit his priorities as an indie developer.