This story begins almost eight years ago...

When the lead developer (Sam Vallely) approached a popular Scottish wrestling promotion, with a proposal to produce a licensed game. With gameplay like No Mercy and featuring the promotion's top stars. The idea was met with excitement and seemed to be a recipe for success.

Sam started developing core features such as hit detection, health/stamina systems, the Create-A-Wrestler system and even a story mode which followed a timeline of the promotion's rise.

But after spending many months modelling and texturing real world wrestlers and environments, the promotion began to loose some of its stars and instructed that they be removed from the game. This was concerning as some of these wrestlers were crucial to story elements which had been developed. Not to mention the amount of time spent on creating 3D representations of these wrestlers. Communication with the promotion began to dwindle to the point where we would have to wait weeks on getting a single logo or graphic. As communication worsened, the project sadly faded in to obscurity.

The game engine which had been in development for almost two years then sat on the shelf, until...

February 28th, 2020. Sam made a post on social media expressing his desire to return to making a wrestling game.

Sam had come to the realization that while a licensed wrestling game could be successful, the most important aspect was the game engine, and perhaps fans wouldn't object to fictional/unknown characters if they were able to create their own - as long as the gameplay was good.

Unfortunately, much of what had been made during the previous version of the game had to be scrapped. All of the wrestlers, attires and environments couldn't be used. However, Sam managed to salvage the Create-a-Wrestler system he had started along with menu systems and some of the core gameplay elements.

Over the next couple of years, Sam would work on the game in his spare time and started to develop the style and feel of this new engine with a brand new title. The game's name is actually an Easter egg of sorts. Since the game is so heavily inspired by the wrestling games from the '90s, he looked to the N64's original development name: the "Ultra 64".
"Ultra Pro Wrestling" was the obvious choice.

In the middle of 2022, Sam made the decision to commit to this project full time and restarted "Hyperfocus Games" (the company through which Ultra Pro Wrestling would be developed and produced).

With only a shoe-string budget and a dream - Hyperfocus Games has since grown to have an office and a small team of passionate people, working to make this dream a reality.