AEW Executive Reveals Exactly When Tony Khan Created AEW Fight Forever

AEW Fight Forever has finally arrived. Tony Khan's young company's first venture into console video games has been highly touted for many months now, with AEW Fight Forever trailers hyping up the game's arcade-style action as well as its unique match types like the Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match. Longtime fans of All Elite Wrestling know that this game has been in development for quite some time, as plans for a console video game were first publicly announced in November 2020. That said, ideas for AEW Fight Forever were first conceptualized much further back than that.

"On day one, Tony Khan creates AEW. On day two, Tony Khan creates AEW Fight Forever," AEW SVP Nik Sobic told AEW Unrestricted. "It's very close to the truth. I was the first employee to AEW. On day one, we pumped a bunch of money into this company to get it off the ground. On day two, we had the nerve to go back and ask him for another pile of money to make this video game."

It's no secret that AEW Fight Forever was a major financial investment for the company, but Sobic noted that it all came with a strategic mindset.

"The nice thing about Tony is that he's not a super emotional thinker. He's a super strategic, data and high-level thinker. We just presented our case," Sobic continued. "We said, 'We think there is a gap in the market for a game like this. AEW's audience loves video games. You look at social media sentiment and the type of game people have been asking for, this is like 20 years in the making. People have been waiting for this for a long time.' It was a pretty easy pitch. It was a successful pitch because three and a half years later, we have a video game ready to go."

AEW Fight Forever is available now. Check out a snippet of ComicBook.com's Connor Casey's review of the game below...

"AEW: Fight Forever has the core of a genuinely great wrestling game, as the gameplay is pure, unabashedly fun. And while going the route of No Man's Sky has been teased in interviews — in which waves of post-launch updates and DLC help improve the experience — it's also possible this goes the route of Street Fighter where a sequel could build off the original idea and strike gold," Casey wrote. "This game won't change the pro wrestling video game landscape, but fans of AEW and players looking for a different experience from WWE's annual offering will enjoy it."