WWE Brings WarGames To Survivor Series For The First Time Ever

For the first time on a main-roster show, the iconic cage match that was conceived in WCW, WarGames, will take place this year at WWE's Survivor Series pay-per-view event. Created by WWE Hall of Famer Dusty Rhodes in 1987, the WarGames match is a type of steel cage match, except there are two rings positioned right next to each other, and the roofless cage surrounds both rings.

In WWE, the WarGames event came about over at NXT in 2017 and was held under the TakeOver name. Last year, WWE discontinued the TakeOver name with its rebranding as NXT 2.0. Talking to The Ringer, WWE's head of creative Paul "Triple H" Levesque explained the history of the match and how he wanted to change the Survivor Series concept this year from going brand vs. brand to more story-driven matches.

"We'll have a men's WarGames match and a women's WarGames match. The tradition of the Survivor Series has ebbed and flowed and changed slightly over time, but this will be similar to that," Levesque explained. "This will not be Raw versus SmackDown. It will be much more story-line driven. I still look at it as a traditional component to Survivor Series in there because it’s large teams of people competing. We just upped the ante a little bit with WarGames and made it evolve."

Here's how the match works: one member of each five-man team starts inside the cage. When five minutes have passed, one of the doors is unlocked and a member from the team that won a coin flip (usually not shown on TV, but told through commentary) enters the ring and a two-on-one handicap match ensues. Two minutes later, a member of the opposite team that didn't just enter, then goes in. The teams alternate entries at two-minute intervals until everyone is in the ring.

"I love the original ones, the very first ones, with the Horsemen and Dusty and the Road Warriors and everybody else," Levesque continued. "Those were always my favorites. It was a different time in the business, a simpler time in the business."

Survivor Series WarGames will take place on Saturday, November 26, 2022, at the TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts.