Sodom may have been inspiration from this guy....

As a rumour goes that Mike Haggar was based on Jesse Ventura who also became a mayor of some American town I think, I can see the similarity there but it's just a rumour as Mike Haggar was around way before Jesse Ventura!

I never heard Mike Haggar was influenced by Jesse "The Body" Ventura. The wrestler i heard influenced in creating Haggar was "Macho Man" Randy Savage. Knowing well who both Ventura and Savage are, Savage does seem the more likely one of the two to me to have been the basis for Haggar (if any actual wrestler was). Even in "Saturday Night Slam Masters", Haggar's nickname is 'Macho' and when he wins a match he hoists Jessica up onto his shoulder ala Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth.

Anyways, yes Jesse Ventura was a mayor at one point, specifically the mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. You got it wrong that Haggar was around way before Ventura though. Jesse started wrestling back in the mid 1970's and started to get famous in the old AWA, then pretty much became a household name amongst the wrestling fans and community when he joined the WWF (now WWE) in the early 80's. So Jesse Ventura started wrestling a good 13 or 14 years before Mike Haggar was created, and certainly was a big name in wrestling by the time Haggar was created.

But I can see some very interesting likeness of some of the characters to real life wrestlers, such as ANDORE (and also HUGO in SF3) who is a definitive inspiration from the 1980s WWF wrestler, ANDRE THE GIANT!

Yeah, there's no question about it that the Andore family/Hugo were based on Andre The Giant. The makers have made that one known.

But also Sodom seemed to be an inspiration of another British wrestler who was big in the 80s, KENDO NAGASAKI! Who was actually a British guy by the name of Peter Thornley.

Kendo Nagasaki was big back in the 70's too.

I've never heard anything about Sodom being influenced by any actual wrestler, and personally i don't think he was based on anyone specific. When it comes to Kendo Nagasaki, to me, the only thing him and Sodom really have in common is that they are both caucasian guys pretending to be Japanese. Sodom to me just has the general appearance of a shogun or samurai. Sodom did apparently get his name from the German thrash metal band Sodom though, as did quite a few of the characters in the game get their names from rock/metal bands/albums/musicians.

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