Mat Dickie

In 2019, Dickie confirmed on his social media that he is working on a new wrestling project for mobile devices and the Nintendo Switch.

In July 2018, Dickie once again announced his retirement from full-time game development, citing "frightening intolerance" from digital retailers among other reasons. In an interview, he also cited increasing demands from players after the release of AAA titles such as WWE 2K19. Dickie stated he did not wish to compete directly with WWE games, but intended to provide a "cheaper... lighter... [and] more creative alternative that's always going to be made by one man or a smaller team."

In early 2012, Dickie was unemployed, about to buy his first home and awaiting the birth of his first child; this motivated him to come out of retirement and move to developing mobile games, releasing Wrestling Revolution as his first major mobile game. He also released several 2D remakes of his classic PC games on mobile, such as Popscene in 2014, Wrecked, and Hard Time in 2017. His most successful game to date, Wrestling Revolution 3D, reached 50 million downloads, becoming the first sports game on Google Play to do so.

Dickie retired from developing video games in early 2009 after the release of The You Testament, a game based on biblical stories he developed in three months, with PC Gamer calling it the "best worst game ever." Retiring from game development, he became a developer of educational applications, publishing educational resources on TES. Dickie had ambitions of enhancing learning and making learning fun; however, he later came to the conclusion that entertainment did not have much of a role to play in education. As of 2017, his educational resources have been used in 10,000 classrooms; he was also invited to the 2011 TES awards. He also became an author, writing a book on his game development career and writing others on religion and spirituality as a religious educator.

In 2007, Dickie created his first major non-wrestling game, Hard Time, a prison simulator which was named by Games for Windows Magazine as the "Indie Game of the Month". The game was almost released through a subsidiary of THQ. Dickie was also looking forward to develop his wrestling brand with them; however, they felt it was a conflict of interest.

In 2006, Idigicon, who had previously published one of Dickie's games, Boxer's Story, contacted him again to make a version of his newest release, Wrestling Encore, for the British professional wrestling promotion One Pro Wrestling; however, legal complications arose due to 1PW not having the video game license to the American professional wrestlers working for them. In order to counteract this issue, 1PW attempted to buy the rights to the whole game off of Dickie instead of the rights to sell the version he had created for the promotion at their live shows, with the added benefit of him getting to meet the wrestlers working for the promotion at the time, including Bret Hart and Jeff Jarrett, Dickie decided to decline this offer.

Dickie began his game development career in 2000 with his first PC game, going on to retire in 2009 to become an educator. He came out of retirement in late 2011 and transitioned to mobile game development, which led to the release of Wrestling Revolution in 2012. However, he once again retired from full-time game development in 2018. In 2019, Dickie confirmed that a new wrestling project was in development for the Nintendo Switch and mobile devices.

One day, Dickie was walking through a Woolworths when he stumbled across a copy of DIV Game Studio, a programming language that promised to make game development easy, Mat bought it, and spent the summer of 2000 learning how to use it from the examples.

Dickie released his first game, Hardy Boyz Stunt Challenge, in August 2000. The game had the player play as one of the Hardy Boyz, who were wrestlers in the WWF (later renamed the WWE). The game took two weeks to complete and was posted on a wrestling website where it received 15,000 downloads and positive feedback, which inspired him to continue making video games and to make his own website in November 2000 to host his games. He moved to Manchester in 2001 to complete a Bachelor of Science in video games and computers at Salford University.

Dickie also tinkered with Deluxe Paint on his Commodore Amiga until he acquired a PC in 1998, which signaled the beginning of his game development career.

Mat Dickie (born 1981) is an English indie video game designer, developer and author who releases games under the name MDickie. He is most notable for his indie professional wrestling games, such as Wrestling Revolution for iOS and Android devices, which received over 100,000 downloads two months after its launch in 2012. The game later went on to surpass 10 million downloads and its sequel, Wrestling Revolution 3D, went on to compete with WWE 2K games on the mobile and PC market.

Mat Dickie was born in Brigg, North Lincolnshire in 1981. His parents worked on a small newsstand, where he stayed while they worked, and boredom drove him to express his creativity by producing makeshift toys for himself with the materials available there. He attended Brigg Primary School. He became interested in developing games at an early age, often sketching out ideas for games. Some of his works were influenced by games he played as a child, including WWF No Mercy, Super Fire Pro Wrestling and WWF WrestleFest.