On July 31, 2021, WWE announced the dismissal of Bray Wyatt via termination of the contract. No one understood anything and the fighter would spend a year away from the company until he returned to impact, scare and fall in love with everyone.
► WWE's Brayt Wyatt Dismissal
But its surprising departure would affect the development of the video game wwe 2k22. This is recalled by the associated narrative design leader of WWE 2K, Andrea Listenberger, who was also a member of the SmackDown creative team, in a recent interview with Wrestlezone's senior editor, Matt Black:
“I remember exactly where I was when Bray was fired and my first reaction was: 'Oh, shit!' Because it was a fairly important story. And we think: 'We have to turn, we have to see how to handle this.' And we did it, but honestly … it is never fun to have to reconfigure a story. “
In the same way, Bray Wyatt's death was noticed on WWE 2K25Listenberger also remembers:
“We had tried to resume that story previously. We had plans to bring it back in a very different way in 2k24. In fact, We had scheduled to record new audio with Bray before his deathto combine it with some existing kinematics and give a context consistent to his character at that time.
Obviously, things were not so. Unfortunately he died long before expected, and that did not happen. It made no sense to simply insert his stories and put a random plot of Bray Wyatt in Myrise. When we were working on the island for 25, we started talking about including an area of the Wyatt Sicks.
We did not have a very specific idea of the story that we would tell there. We began to launch some proposals and from there the idea of using Bray Wyatt material arose, especially with what the Wyatt Sicks were doing on television: How they talked about Bray, how they broke the fourth wall. That came from the initial vignettes of Bo Dallas, Uncle Howdy, and so on.
The idea was: 'Is there anything we can do in a video game that no one else can do? Do we want to break the fourth wall as they were doing on TV? ' Hence the concept, and everything began. ”
