Ivar Reveals What Led To Viking Raiders Getting Their WWE Name

Ivar and Erik are called the Viking Raiders on the WWE main roster, a different name from their NXT days and their independent days. On the independent scene, they were originally called War Machine. When they got to NXT, they were changed to War Raiders. They were also briefly called ‘The Viking Experience’, but fans probably don’t want to remember that. In an interview with Chris Van Vliet for Insight (via Post Wrestling), Ivar detailed why the team couldn’t keep their War Machine name. It was due to its association with former MMA fighter Jonathan Koppenhaver, who used the name, and is serving life in prison for multiple counts of sexual assault, kidnapping and domestic battery. Ivar said:

“We knew coming into NXT that our names would have to change. Mainly because right around the time that Ring of Honor names us War Machine, there was an MMA fighter, who got in a lot of trouble for a lot of things, we don’t wanna mention it. So we had the conversation with Triple H and he said, ‘You know, I can’t have kids Googling that, right?’ Absolutely. Don’t (Google it). It’s not worth your time. So we’re like ‘Alright,’ so then we came to a bunch of names and War Raiders is what we settled on. So we had a little bit of the element from the indies where we were War Machine and a little bit more Viking going forward with the Raiders, no problem and the fans were fine with it. They were fine with it, and I think we asked if we could just keep our Hanson and Rowe names because we were associated with that, with the titles in New Japan, Ring of Honor, like, so if people did search us, they would all pop up, so there’s lineage. Hunter was totally cool with that so, that’s how it started but when we got called up, whew! Whew, whew. Yeah, that was a little rough…”

“And the way the story goes, Vince (McMahon) loves Vikings. So, he found out there’s a team in NXT that were Vikings and he’s like, ‘Yes, I want them,’ and now he wanted Viking in our name, and they couldn’t pass anything through legal. There’s already a Vikings football team, there’s already a Vikings TV show. So none of the names they were trying, whatever they were, they (weren’t) getting through. Then somebody, I won’t say who, because it was asked in the meeting, ‘What are they? How to describe them?’ And then, somebody describes us as like, ‘Oh, they’re this, they’re that, they’re like a Viking experience’ and it was like, ‘That’s it! They’re The Viking Experience’ and not one person was happy or okay with that except for the one man.”

“So, we were stuck and then our debut, we find out last-minute that we’re coming in. We get flight cancellations. It was in Montreal. We don’t land internationally in Montreal until — I didn’t even get into the building until almost 5 PM, the day of our debut so we couldn’t even talk to him. We get there and we just see on the tron, ‘Viking Experience.’ We’re like, ‘Oh man, what is going on?’ Then we went to talk to him and be like, look, we can’t be this amusement park ride name, and we talked to him and like, he respect — and we went there and we were told about the whole Viking thing so we were told, ‘If you’re gonna pitch names, just make sure it says Viking in it.’”

“So we had like, I don’t know, six or seven names, Viking names that we had picked. We’d already given up on our regular names, Erik and Ivar, no problem, whatever (he laughed) … and that wasn’t worth even trying. So we’re just trying to change because the tag team name was so bad. It was awful. Still is, it haunts us to this day and when we are listing off these names, we got to Viking Raiders and he stopped us and said, ‘Look, this is how we’re gonna introduce you to the audience, the main roster audience and if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it going forward’ and literally two days later on the website, it changed. I think three days (we were The Viking Experience to start our main roster run). Yeah, one show, three days and it haunts us to this day.”