Days after Insider Gaming published an investigation into Ultra Pro Wrestling, its creator sat down for over five hours to answer and respond to our report — but not to Insider Gaming.
The Hyperfocus Games founder declined to engage further with this publication, citing data protection, then answered the story on a YouTube channel that covers his game. Across two videos recorded over two days, he went through the article paragraph by paragraph.
Insider Gaming has since continued to review the project’s full development record: tens of thousands of internal messages spanning three and a half years, budget documents, executed contracts and federal trademark filings.
Parts of CEO Sam Vallely’s account are supported, but several of his central claims are contradicted by his own messages. And a number of the most serious questions were read aloud to him and never answered, or simply brushed aside.
On September 7, a further set of questions was sent to Vallely. Over a week later, he has not responded.
Insider Ultra Pro Wrestling – What Happened During Development?
During his YouTube interview, Vallely gave a detailed explanation of how the AKI trademark application collapsed. A filing agent, he said, put his own contact details on the paperwork rather than the company’s, never forwarded correspondence from the trademark office, allowed the application to lapse, and then offered to fix it for “x amount of thousands of dollars.” He said the federal review now attached to the application exists because Hyperfocus reported the situation.
The public and private filings support this. The correspondence address of record is a house in Connecticut, while the contact addresses are generic filing-agent accounts. The first application was submitted unsigned, with fees paid for one class of goods against three. The suspension notice issued in March concerns “signatures, certifications, and representation of others before the USPTO,” and links applicants to the office’s guidance on trademark scams.
Vallely was also right about the status of his team.
“I’m the only employee,” he said. “I’m the only person that’s ever been an employee.”
Contributors signed as contractors and were paid against invoices. Titles, although publicly announced, were informal. Under UK employment law, the distinction is meaningful, and nothing in the record contradicts it.
Some workers were paid, but still had to pay for their own subscriptions to do the required work; other contributors worked without pay for months. None of them were technically employees. None of the records Insider Gaming reviewed establish a conclusive answer to each contributor’s legal status with respect to Hyperfocus Games.
The letter he sent a rival filer
Asked about messages in which he asserted ownership of the AKI trademark, Vallely said it was him “venting” to friends. He claimed it was a joke that was done in fun.
In February 2025, a representative of another company with a pending trademark contacted Hyperfocus Games to ask whether the AKI filing would cause a conflict. Vallely drafted the reply, circulated it to two colleagues for approval, noted that it “might need spell checked,” and sent it under his name and title.
We actually have the trademarks for ‘AKI’, ‘AKI USA’ and our ‘Iconic’ AKI Logo. I use the term iconic because our logo (and brand identity) is more than 25 years old.
While these trademarks are well established they were at one point abandoned and our recent filing was not only for renewal purposes but also to amend the outdated classification.
Sam Vallely, CEO — Hyperfocus Games.
As mentioned in the first part of the investigation, Hyperfocus Games Limited was incorporated in Scotland in 2023 and has never released a game. It did not hold the AKI trademarks, nor was there any earlier registration to renew. The application was pending and was refused four months later.
Vallely also said the trademark had been announced to backers at the end of a developer podcast, as the closing reveal. “That was the big reveal. We got the trademark.” The company did not have it. The announcement has never been corrected, and the podcast has since been deleted.
As of publication, the trademark applications remain suspended pending administrative review.
“Some staff would rather not be made aware”
Of the animation work, Vallely said: “I’ve always been transparent and open about it.” And, twice: “It’s never been hidden.”
On March 17, 2025, with four new contributors about to be added to the project’s staff Discord, he messaged his project manager.
“I’m thinking we should explain (without mentioning names) the situation with the ‘ripping and how some staff would rather not be made aware. Just thinking we should do this before adding him in to the staff Discord. Just in case people start chatting.”
His project manager replied: “I think that he doesn’t have to explain any technical details about how he sourced the original moves to anyone but you.”
Shortly after, Vallely would say: “Language is so delicate around this that people who don’t/can’t understand process are liable to say the wrong thing, so the less technical information they’re exposed to, the simpler it all is for everyone.”
The toki1 data
Vallely was asked three times in the interview whether animation data had been taken from other games. Each time he said no. Asked directly — “Has any animation data been extracted from any other video game?” — he answered: “No.”
On January 26, 2025, he posted to the entire staff channel:
And I’ve got all the data loaded into Unity and have managed to assign the hit boxes for all moves! I can’t tell you how much time that would have taken if left to do manually…
I’ve been reading some more melonbread and retro Randy conversations, and it seems the toki1 data (which I have) can be used to extract more move data, such as the exact frame for which ring bumps and other sfx are played. Also, the range of frame for which the hitboxes are active.
Toki1 is a data structure inside the AKI games’ ROM files. It is located using tools like VPW Studio, a reverse-engineering tool that works directly on Nintendo 64 ROMs and manipulates the file tables containing wrestler data, textures, audio, and animations. The tool’s manual states it “is not endorsed by AKI Corporation/syn sophia, Nintendo, Asmik Ace, whatever remains of THQ.”
Melonbread and Retro Randy, whose conversations Vallely referenced, are both figures in that modding community.
Hitbox ranges, damage values, and the frames on which sound effects trigger are game data. By his own account, Vallely holds it, obtained it from the AKI titles, loaded it into Ultra Pro Wrestling’s Unity project, and was working through community documentation to obtain more.
Insider Gaming asked Vallely what the toki1 data is, where it came from, and on what basis data derived from those games is used in a commercial product. He did not respond.
The impossibility argument
A substantial part of Vallely’s defence rested on the claim that extraction could not be done at all.
“If you can rip animations, you do it in a day. It doesn’t take you four months,” he said. “Those AKI games—they don’t have rigs. You can’t lift anything from the AKI games and put them into another game. You just can’t do it.
“If you could do it, someone else would have done it.”
He then issued a challenge, asking that “anyone” making claims that ripping animations is possible give him a call because he’d “love to know how you do it.”.
A modder responded, posting a worked example of an animation extracted onto the AEW Fight Forever rig.
“I just want to highlight that it is possible to rip animations, even to the Fight Forever rig,” they said. “This isn’t meant as a dunk on anyone, but saying it can’t be done is inaccurate and diminishes the work of modders who achieved this a year ago, or even earlier.”
That doesn’t explain how Ultra Pro Wrestling’s animations were produced. What it does, however, is contradict the argument Vallely used to say they could not have been produced that way.
Modders have been doing it for years, and it’s become quite easy for them. In fact, in early July, one modder who is known for ripping animations directly from wrestling games was known to be working with UPW.
There are also more instances of 1-to-1 animation rips, which a source stated wasn’t unusual.
Asked about the claims of manually recreating the animations, one source said the “only manual work was copying and pasting the keyframes from the AKI rip to the UPW rip, and even that was buggy.”
“I’ll write up an internal policy”
Vallely was emphatic about AI in the interview.
“There will be no AI art or AI generated 3D assets or whatever in the game at all,” he said, describing the project’s use as limited to placeholder icons in a development tool and graphics for a publisher pitch deck that was never presented.
The record shows wider use, and repeated friction over it.
On April 1, 2025, the project published AI-generated artwork as an April Fools’ item. Eleven days later, a contributor objected in the staff channel: “I thought we didn’t do AI? Wasn’t there a whole big fuckin mess cus we used an AI background once?”
Vallely said he would write up an internal policy on the company’s position on using AI. The contributor suggested it read “1. Don’t.” Insider Gaming has found no evidence the policy was written.
In October 2025, Vallely sent reference images and said he was going to see if the “image AI thing” could do a good job in making UPW characters based on requests. The results were discussed for Patreon. Days earlier, comparing an AI image to work by an artist the concept artist had hired, Vallely wrote: “Yeah the AI one is much better.”
In a separate message sent to the team, Vallely said that he was “making massive progress on the animations the past few days, and last night my weekly Fable limit reset.”
He added: “I’ve currently used 50% of my new weekly limits.”
After saying there would be no AI in the game, the records show it has been used regularly, at least on the programming side. Insider Gaming has seen invoices that even show nearly $400 spent on Anthropic’s Claude over a 13-day period.
Said one source, “It’s not the use of AI that bothered some of us. It was the trying to convince that it’s not. Just be honest.”
Money spent on a wrestler who never signed
With the game being funded by a Kickstarter campaign and contributions from Patreon subscribers, funds behind Ultra Pro Wrestling were limited. Decisions had to be made regarding how the money would be spent as they worked towards a promised demo and early access.
Some of those funds, as it turns out, were to have a third-party studio produce models and designs for a wrestler who not only wasn’t signed to the game’s roster, but, as of July 2026, still isn’t signed.
As mentioned, the company’s funds were limited throughout. Vallely has said he paid himself £420 a month. His art director was on £1,000 a month. Several contributors were paid nothing at all across three years. The game has no release date that has held, and no playable build has ever been issued to backers.
But money was being spent to have models and designs done for Rob Van Dam (RVD). In 2023, Vallely argued that if RVD saw himself in the game, he would “realise people just put him in games now without his consent so he might as well sign with companies like us and at least get something.”
While the model does, admittedly, look good, those who worked on the game told me that there was frustration about the ever-changing priority for the game.
“There was never a clear direction,” one source said. “It was all about what came to his mind over a weekend, and we’d be sent dozens of messages about something different each time.”
The spending is also one instance of a broader pattern around talent the project did not have under contract.
In January 2024, Ultra Pro Wrestling had already announced D-Von Dudley as part of its roster in a public showcase video. He had not signed. When he subsequently signed with WWE, the team discussed internally whether to quietly remove him.
One contributor argued they had to: “I think to leave him on when we know he won’t be able to be in the game is misinforming buyers when we have knowledge of otherwise.”
Vallely’s objection was about how it would look.
“So if the sentiment is ‘fuck Dvon’ — why are we doing him the favour of removing him?” Vallely asked. “That’s what he would want, which makes us look like the bad guys. The guys who can’t be trusted. We tell our fans he’s in the game then have to say ‘ooops, sorry, guess we didn’t have him signed after all.'”
Later in the same exchange, he was more direct about the risk:
“Yeah, I guess that’s my main concern,” he said. ”If people know we announced him without a signature, then they have no reason to believe we have anyone else signed. They won’t believe demolition is legit because there’s already concerns around their IP.”
It was then proposed to remove him quietly while seeing how many people notice. Should it be noticed, then the company could issue a statement about it.
What the silence was for
In the years since the game was announced, backers have repeatedly gone lengthy periods without meaningful updates on Ultra Pro Wrestling, and Vallely has attributed the gaps to development.
The internal record shows what the team was working on during two of the longest stretches.
In November 2024, the project’s investor came out of a meeting in Los Angeles where a Netflix production executive had asked whether anyone could tackle WWE. He reportedly offered Ultra Pro Wrestling as a base.
“He asked if we would be open to creating a white-label WWE version using their current talent… It’s easily a 7-figure deal.”
What was proposed was not Ultra Pro Wrestling. It was its engine, stripped of the character creation backers had paid for, populated with WWE’s current roster, built for mobile under the working names Throwback and Backlash.
The team built a pitch in ten days. On November 20, Vallely told them the Netflix contact had seen UPW footage and that they believed it was “perfect.” On December 18, he then said that the pitch was shown and that it “stole the show”.
It came to nothing. Netflix cancelled six games in February 2025, and the contact left the company. By April, one contributor was privately frustrated, saying, “everything seems to be focused on pandering to Netflix to have some hopeful greenlight when we are almost in May and have delayed already and set expectations.”
The pattern repeated in spring 2026 with All Elite Wrestling. From mid-April to early June, the team worked on a Fight Forever sequel pitch, with Vallely again restructuring the engine to run white-label AEW content instead of Ultra Pro Wrestling, the game backers had paid thousands to support.
On June 5, his project manager wrote: “Our situation right now is that AEW don’t want to give us any money.” On June 9, the work was paused after AEW parted ways with the executive overseeing video game development.
Backers were told none of this. When the Netflix pitch video was finally released to Patreon subscribers in October 2025 — eleven months after the work was done — Vallely instructed the team to strip out what it had been for.
“We’re going to put up a post showing the pitch video, but under no circumstances can we mention Netflix or WWE’s involvement,” he said. “We can only say this was part of a pitch we were asked to do.”
In the interview, Vallely presented this as transparency: “I just came clean with it, because my allegiance is to the people that are supporting us on Patreon… I never signed an NDA. So I was like, screw it, I’m just going to tell people.”
In June 2026, explaining to his team why backers still had not received a proper update, he wrote: “We can’t talk about AEW, we couldn’t talk about the Netflix thing.”
Sources at AEW, when presented with Vallely’s comments, responded, saying, “Hyperfocus never had a chance to make a Fight Forever 2; that was never something that was going to happen. Just leave it at that.”
The title
On January 8, 2025, responding to backers who had used the word “vaporware,” Vallely posted publicly: “Gimbles is our COO/Project Manager.”
On June 26, 2026, negotiating that colleague’s salary, he wrote privately: “Like, your role is COO, and Google may tell you that a COO of a games company in London can earn up to 90k. But we aren’t in London, we are the smallest studio you could get, and though your title is COO, you have no prior experience in that role.”
On July 27, 2026, removing him: “COO and any other title you imagined yourself to have is officially revoked. No new role will be offered…”
In the same message, he described the position as “an informal title given to you simply because you and Lew persuaded me by saying it would be more impressive in emails.”
The dismissal message was read aloud in the interview. Vallely was not asked about the contradiction and did not raise it.
From the same June exchange: “I ran what you gave me through AI, and it said that since you are also involved in writing stories I could bump your salary to 50-55k.” And, on his colleague’s proposals for the wider team: “I think you are looking out for the boys, and that’s great. But as a business we need to put HFG first.”
Unanswered questions
Several items from the original story were read to Vallely on camera and not addressed.
The instruction that new contributors not be told about the ripping. The COO contradiction. His public claim in January 2025 that 70%-80% of “all the animations across every AKI game” had been recreated. And a message instructing his project manager not to discuss the trademark situation with his art director, because “he can get overly worried about this kinda stuff.”
One more, from April 2026, three days before the AEW meeting: “If a decision was made to include the AI art and if you think Hal and Lucha would throw a hissy fit, then we don’t include them in the meeting. We need to have our business heads on here.”
The interviewer read it out and said he didn’t understand it. Vallely’s answer, in full: “Yeah, I know. Again, I don’t know.”
Vallely also described evidence he holds. All three disputed budget documents—”I’ve still got them, you know, they’re all dated and timestamped.”
Recorded meetings with every contributor but two, confirming his account of their status: “they all acknowledge this. So this is like not in dispute at all.” There was also a message he characterized as blackmail and extortion.
Insider Gaming asked him to provide all three for comparison to the budget documents seen by this outlet, and to republish the deleted podcast he described as “me being transparent showing the whole thing.” We also asked about the message he viewed as blackmail and extortion. Again, he has not responded.
There is also the concern that the roughly 50 championship belts promised to top-tier backers in 2023 have not been delivered, and there has been no public update on them in three years. The trademark application remains suspended, and the Patreon is still accepting subscriptions.
Vallely has promised a full gameplay video before the end of September and early access before February, the fourth public date given for a playable release.
Insider Gaming first contacted Sam Vallely on August 20, 2026. The original story was published on September 2. He replied twice during that period and said in his subsequent interview that he had been given two days to respond.
In our earliest correspondence, I did request that answers come in as soon as possible, but I could hold the story for a few days. Further questions were sent on September 7. He did not respond.
Mike has been covering the gaming industry since 2012, and has reported on some of the largest events in the industry while also working as an investigative reporter. Outside of…
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