Most everyone is familiar with Ronda Rousey: The Fighter. A former UFC champion, she has captured the world’s attention in a way that few have. She’s broken records in the cage and at the box office and has achieved a level of celebrity never before seen in MMA.
There’s another side to Rousey, however, that few know about; Ronda Rousey: The Gamer.
She’s been spotted a few times over the years. A tweet here. A silly video there. For the most part, however, she has been fairly elusive.
Until now, that is. While working alongside EA Canada, the Vancouver-based branch of the gaming giant behind the upcoming EA Sports UFC 2 title, Rousey sat down with Bleacher Report to discuss her gaming history and habits.
“Over the last couple of years, I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft,” she said before clarifying she swaps between playing a Night Elf Hunter and Blood Elf Rogue. “I’d need to have a little gaming station set up, and lately, with everything getting so crazy, I’ve been playing more mobile games.”
It should come as little surprise that the series nearest and dearest to her heart is Pokemon. Rousey turned heads back in 2012 when she told CagePotato.com’s Matt Saccaro that she was, in her youth, a moderator for a Pokemon Stadium 2 forum. Since then, she has discussed the quest to catch ’em all on several occasions.
The now 20-year-old franchise has had tens of millions of fans around the world over the years, but Rousey has stuck on the bandwagon throughout. “The one I put the most hours into was Blue,” she said, referring to one of the original titles in the series. “But when I was into getting the forms, it was Pokemon Crystal. Yeah, I think Pokemon Crystal was probably my favorite.”
Like most lifelong Pokemon fans, popping that first cartridge into her Game Boy wasn’t just a fun ride…it was an incredibly memorable one.
Rousey can recount the first time she caught a legendary Pokemon (Articuno, to be precise) and can tell you about how she was one of the lucky few to get a legitimate Mew from one of the late-1990s Nintendo mall tours. Last year, she talked about how the Pokemon she would most like to face in the Octagon would be Throh, the judo Pokemon, in a Reddit discussion (h/t Tech Insider).
Pokemon wasn’t the only game she played, of course. “I played all the Zeldas,” she said, talking about Nintendo’s iconic Legend of Zelda series. “Ocarina of Time holds a special place in my heart. I literally celebrated after I beat it…I was such a big fan of just riding Epona (the hero’s horse) around in Hyrule Field for no reason.
“That was my way to get out when I was a kid, just taking my horse out. That’s one thing I love now about World of Warcraft, just getting on a flying mount and flying around in a 3D space.”
One of Rousey‘s other all-time favorite games, WWF Super WrestleMania, ties directly into her recent exploits. Rousey made waves in 2015 at WrestleMania 31. Appearing alongside her The Fast and the Furious 7 castmate, Dwayne Johnson (known to WWE fans as The Rock), she planted the seeds for a showdown with WWE supervillains.
Her love of wrestling goes back way further than that, however, and digitized wrestling theme songs were a memorable part of her childhood.
“My sister and I would just spend the day at our babysitter’s house, and [the WWF game] was our soundtrack. We would put it on their profiles and play their theme songs while we were doing whatever downstairs,” she says before singing a line from Ted DiBiase’s theme song. “When I was a kid, I always liked the faces. I liked Hulk Hogan. I had a Hulk Hogan wrestling buddy. I was all about Hulk Hogan.”
These days, Rousey‘s tastes in both wrestlers and video games have shifted a bit. Her favorite wrestlers, Dean Ambrose and Bray Wyatt, blur the alignment lines. Her favorite games have to be able to accommodate her hectic schedule, with the mobile title Taichi Panda eating up hours on airplanes.
In town for a motion-capture session with EA Canada for EA Sports UFC 2, though, she had the chance to get her hands on the upcoming game.
“I think it’s awesome…the little things in there are really impressive to me,” she said. “We were playing Robbie Lawler vs. Rory MacDonald back there, and just things like how they got up off the ground when the round ended was something that really impressed me. Just little things that are extremely realistic that you won’t find in any other sports game.”
Rousey, of course, is one of the two cover athletes for the title, which drops March 15. Fans wanting to see the former champ back in the cage can get their fill of her on Playstation 4 and Xbox One in anticipation of her real-life return later this year.
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