The following is an excerpt from an ESPN.com interview with Bryan Williams, designer of the new “WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2011″ video game, where he speaks on Daniel Bryan being excluded from the roster of the game:

Jon Robinson: The game’s roster has been announced and the Nexus members aren’t in the game, but will be offered later on as downloadable content. Why aren’t they included on the disc? Did they debut too late?

Bryan Williams: The whole thing with Nexus is that when we saw season one of NXT, we didn’t have the ability to put in the entire roster and the guys we could get, they debuted so late that they had to be downloadable content. But we first had to decide who the top guys were so we could include them. So working with the WWE, we figured the top three guys were Wade Barrett, David Otunga, and Daniel Bryan. Daniel Bryan was originally going to be a part of the NXT season one package that we were going to offer online. What’s funny is, the day that we mo-capped all of his moves, I was hanging out with the mo-cap guys in the hotel and when I check my phone, I find out that Daniel Bryan was released. I tell the guys, and nobody believed me. But then when we found out that the release was legit, we ended up having to take him out of the game and we replaced him with Justin Gabriel. The Gabriel character is going to be great, though, as he’s got some really cool moves. He’s a really entertaining wrestler and he’s got a good move set. I like strikers and he kicks a lot. So we don’t have Daniel Bryan, but we do have Justin Gabriel.

Jon Robinson: But now that Daniel Bryan has been rehired and you already motion-captured his moves, wouldn’t it be easy to just add him to the download pack?

Bryan Williams: No, because everything at that point was what we were going to do. The creation hadn’t started yet. We were getting the motions ready for the models, but no work had been done on his model at that time. So once we found out about his release and we swapped in Justin Gabriel, then we started creating the models. We have been seeing if it’s feasible to include him in some DLC down the line, but if it doesn’t work out for this year’s title, he’ll definitely be in next year’s version.

Jon Robinson: Unless he gets released again.

Bryan Williams: [laughs] I was bummed out that we didn’t get him in the game because I’m a big fan of his. I was so gassed up to know that he was going to be in the game.

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