In 2001, WWE bought its chief rival WCW, including all its assets and most of its personnel. After WWE ran through its largely panned invasion story and WCW's wrestlers were absorbed on-screen into WWE's roster by 2002, WWE was left with the issue of having a huge roster of wrestlers and on-screen talent. Their solution was to split the roster between its two flagship shows, RAW and SmackDown! and have each roster be its own exclusive brand. With the WWE World Champion taking the title to SmackDown!, RAW was left without a world champion. Enter the World Heavyweight Championship, represented by a modified version of WCW's Big Gold Belt. This title was kept for the next eleven years before WWE creative ended the brand split and unified this belt with the original WWE World title. In 2016, the roster was split into exclusive brands again, and a new Universal Championship was unveiled for the Raw roster. In 2020, that title was won in a Winner-Takes-All match, though it was never officially unified, meaning that it still technically exists as part of the WWE World championship, but is not represented by a separate physical belt anymore. To offset THAT loss, a THIRD World Heavyweight title was produced for the brand that had no world champion, which was once again RAW.
With all that said, this quiz tracks the separate lineages of those three World titles. Can you name all the wrestlers to have held one of the OTHER world championships within WWE?
Note: Quiz updated once a year after WrestleMania.
Alternate spellings may exist for some names that might be more difficult to spell. Wrestlers who appeared under alternate names and characters can be guessed with just one of those names and will appear under only one of those name. Guessing a wrestler once will fill in all of their reigns..
"Date Won" means the calendar date on which the wrestler won the title, not the WWE "recognised" date. "R#" corresponds to the cumulative reign number for that respective champion.
Vacant: On a number of occasions and for a variety of reasons, the world titles have been vacated by their holder. The date relating to each vacancy is when the champion relinquished the belt.
This quiz tracks the three world championships that have existed alongside the original WWE World Heavyweight Championship since 2002. There's a separate quiz for that specific championship.