The night before was Halloween Havoc 1998, headlined by Goldberg vs. Diamond Dallas Page for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Of course, the show also featured "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan vs. Warrior in one of the worst matches of all time, but we can talk about that later.

The way pay-per-views work is that the provider sets aside a certain amount of time for the wrestling company's pay-per-view to air. Budgeting time is very important. If you go back to when WWE was on pay-per-view, its 3-hour shows typically ended at 2 hours, 50 minutes or so. The original All In also suffered from a timing issue, resulting in the main event having to be rushed to make sure the feed didn't get cut.

As it happens, Halloween Havoc was budgeted to go longer for more than 3 hours, but for some reason, the left hand didn't tell the right hand what was happening. For approximately 25% of customers, Halloween Havoc's feed ended before the main event began.

As a makeup, Goldberg vs. DDP was aired for free on Nitro. The segment set a record level of viewership for cable wrestling. I was 8 years old at the time and didn't watch the pay-per-view and didn't have a computer, and even if I did, there was no instantaneous reporting of results from a show like there is now. So I got to watch two of my favorite wrestlers at the time have the best match I had ever seen in my seven months of fandom.

This was the last Nitro that defeated Raw head-to-head in the ratings. Any other victory came on nights where Raw was unopposed or preempted. After October 26, 1998, there is a very clear shift with Raw's popularity as its margin of victory gets bigger. By May 1999, Raw is regularly getting double Nitro's number or more.

Goldberg vs. Diamond Dallas Page, WCW World Heavyweight Championship, Halloween Havoc 1998