Mike Tyson's 'Punch-out' Power Returns to the Ring as Exclusive Special Edition Character in THQ's WWE '13 and Why You Love It

Promotional poster

1987 was a simpler time. Alex P. Keaton was harassing his liberal, ex-hippie parents in the popular sitcom world of Family Ties, the USSR was still an actual thing and most unforgetably, Mike Tyson's Punch-out was created for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The game that was the talk of the Nintendo Universe and middle school and high school classrooms across the US boasted a highly decorated cast of fictional characters including  the anatomically inept Glass Joe, the seemingly Jean-Claude Van Damme movie and car-dealership-inspired Piston Honda, and a guy named Super Macho Man who mysteriously resembled the painting of George Washington in your seventh grade American history book if ol' Georgie had posed while on Herculian amounts of steroids. But after all was said and done, the selling point of the game was your inevitable clash with the most dangerous man in professional sports at the time "Iron" Mike Tyson.

Cover art for the original late 80s game

Photo: Amazon.com

You and your friends would spend hours on end beating each opponent, finding the cheat codes in the latest edition of Nintendo Power just hoping against all odds that any of you could possibly get to the last level and do the impossible and beat him, "Iron Mike" and become the Heavyweight Champion of the World!  But alas, your efforts were to be thwarted most likely by a flurry of uppercuts that most of us only saw in Hong Kong kung fu movies. The fight would be over 30 seconds later and the noble main character of Little Mac would be destroyed after you had just spent the previous three hours with your friends huddled around the TV waiting for you to be the first kid on your block to beat Mike.

Well, a quarter-century later, Mike Tyson has apparently returned to the videogame world for THQ's upcoming installment from its WWE series WWE '13 due out October 30 on all major platforms. The company has confirmed that Tyson, who had a brief stint in the late 90s in WWE's famed "Attitude Era" as a protégé of Degeneration X, will now be a special downloadable character for those who pre-order the game.

Here is an early trailer touting Tyson's return to videogame vengeance. Fans can only hope that this Mike resembles the Mike of old -- if not for us, than for the legacy of Little Mac and his “Star Punch”.

Watch the trailer here at IGN.com.