At the end of the month, WWE is scheduled to stage its seventh annual Halloween Havoc event under the NXT banner. Developmental is a fitting stage for some campy fun that has included costumes, spooky staging, and gimmick matches, not least of all the revival of the Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal concept.
Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal befits Halloween Havoc for having been introduced when the annual event operated under the WCW banner. The 1992 and 1993 Halloween Havocs featured Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal Matches, leaving an outsized legacy for a short period of time that came before WCW’s boom period during the Monday Night War.
These bouts and the larger Halloween Havoc brand remain warm points of nostalgia for WCW fans. Indeed, from 1989 to 2000, the annual PPV was subject to some good, some bad, and some ugly. From his years heading up the company, Eric Bischoff has cited Halloween Havoc, often emanating from Las Vegas, as a flagship show for WCW, and there are certainly some matches worth coming back to.
Cactus Jack vs. Big Van Vader, 1993
In 1993, mainstream American wrestling fans weren’t accustomed to a whole lot of plunder or brutality in their product. Cactus Jack and Big Van Vader offered an antidote. Their feud got going with an uncharacteristically stiff, violent match on WCW Saturday Night, culminating in Vader power bombing Jack on the cement floor.
The storyline to come, a hard-to-follow angle that suggested Cactus had suffered amnesia only for him to turn it around and suggest it was all mind games, left much to be desired. The second Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal gimmick delivered between these two, though, in setting up a wild Texas Death Match.
This bout doesn’t necessarily pack the same punch from a 2026 perspective as the hardcore style grew normalized in the back half of the 1990s and the match lacks the kind of high spots fans expect from an arena-spanning brawl nowadays. Still, it was a hard-hitting classic that was refreshing for its place in early 1990s WCW and its influence on where the business was headed.
Eddie Guerrero Vs. Rey Mysterio, 1997
The 1996 and 1997 editions of Halloween Havoc were, respectively, headlined by Hollywood Hogan defending the WCW Championship against Randy Savage and Roddy Piper. These are main events that feel emblematic of that era of WCW, featuring stars established in decades past cycling through nWo-centric angles.
Earlier bouts on each card cast into the future, though. In 1996, it was an instant classic between Rey Mysterio and Dean Malenko that stole the show. A year later, a sort of spiritual successor pit Mysterio against Eddie Guerrero and raised the ceiling even further, with quite arguably the greatest Halloween Havoc match of all time.
This encounter featured ahead-of-its-time athleticism and a lightning-fast pace, paired with the inimitable technical acumen of the men involved. With Cruiserweight Championship vs. mask stakes, there was something meaningful on the line, and the luchadors put on a bout that stands the test of time.
Diamond Dallas Page Vs. Goldberg, 1998
It’s not exactly a controversial take to say that his match with Diamond Dallas Page at Halloween Havoc 1998 was the best bout of Goldberg’s career. Indeed, it came amidst a lackluster in-ring run that hasn’t exactly aged well. It happened at a show best remembered for the twin foibles of an atrociously bad Hollywood Hogan vs. Warrior farce and a timing error that led to the main event not being broadcast to a large portion of the paying audience.
DDP was notorious for plotting out the action excessively. This match stands out as one of the greatest testaments that sometimes planning a match spot-by-spot does have merit over calling it in the ring. The plan capitalized on Goldberg’s strengths, worked around his limitations, and delivered arguably the champ’s only truly satisfying start-to-finish main event.
It helped that Goldberg and Page alike were very, very over, two of the most popular stars at the late stages of WCW’s peak popularity. The match went down as an instant classic and one of the promotion’s best world title bouts of the Monday Night War era.
Chamber Of Horrors, 1991
There are a number of legitimate WCW Halloween Havoc classics. This isn’t one of them.
To its credit, the Halloween Havoc 1991 Chamber of Horrors Match featured an objectively impressive roster of talent. Of the eight men involved, seven were eventual WWE Hall of Famers and four were future world champions. The match included Sting, WCW’s franchise player of the day, teamed with The Steiner Brothers as the company’s top tag team.
The heel team paired iconic rivals Big Van Vader and Cactus Jack alongside The Diamond Studd: Scott Hall a year before he’d settle into the Razor Ramon gimmick that elevated his career and legacy.
For all the star power and a cool looking steel cage, the match represented a lot of what was and would stay wrong with WCW. It was a shapeless, under-booked disaster with little direction amidst too many bodies aimlessly brawling. Worse, it featured an over-the-top gimmick of victory being achieved via electric chair electrocution, not to mention faulty props, in particular the lever to activate the chair accidentally falling down early to prove beyond any doubt there was no real danger at hand.
This match warrants revisiting for the novelty of seeing the stars involved in this comic context, besides the unintentional comedy that makes it a genuine pleasure to rewatch in spite of itself.
Sting Vs. Jake Roberts
Mainstream US wrestling fans tend to remember Jake Roberts for specific periods in his career, bound to WWE. There was the born-again babyface run of the mid-1990s. There was his time as a perennial upper-mid card face of the late 1980s into the early 1990s. Perhaps most intriguing, there was his heel run from 1991 to 1992 that was uncharacteristically, captivatingly sinister for its time as he advanced to the upper levels of the card feuding with Randy Savage, The Ultimate Warrior, and The Undertaker.
It’s a bit of a forgotten chapter of The Snake’s career that from August to November he played a villain in WCW. This run was all about Roberts feuding against Sting, a nice draw at the time for fans who paid more attention to WWE as the character largely picked up where it had left off there, besides offering a fun main event diversion while the company experimented with Ron Simmons as world champion.
Sting vs. Roberts at Halloween Havoc 1992 fell short of what expectations fans had for the original Spin the Wheel, Make the Deal Match. With myriad tantalizing gimmick match possibilities on the board, WCW didn’t run with its imagination so much as embrace the more conservative possibilities the gimmick allowed for, delivering a Coal Miner’s Glove Match. Despite the rules feeling less than inspired and the match not being a classic by any measure, it nonetheless represents a fun time capsule of a very specific moment for WCW and a prototypical babyface clashing with one of the best villains in the game.
