The 1988 SummerSlam (marketed as SummerSlam '88) was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE). It was the inaugural SummerSlam and took place on Monday, August 29, 1988, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York. The pay-per-view was created to help the company compete against rival promotion Jim Crockett Promotions. It was one of the first four annual pay-per-view events produced by the WWF, along with WrestleMania, the Royal Rumble, and Survivor Series, which were eventually dubbed the "big four".

The event consisted of 10 professional wrestling matches. The preliminary matches included a title defense by WWF Intercontinental Champion The Honky Tonk Man against a surprise challenger, revealed to be Ultimate Warrior, who won the match in just 31 seconds to end Honky Tonk's 14-month title reign, at the time, the longest Intercontinental Championship reign in history. The main event was a match pitting The Mega Powers (Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage) against their long-time rivals, The Mega Bucks (Ted DiBiase and André the Giant). Hogan and Savage won the match after Miss Elizabeth, Savage's manager, distracted André and DiBiase by removing her skirt to reveal her underwear.

In the late 1980s, the World Wrestling Federation's (WWF, now WWE) main competition in the professional wrestling industry was from the National Wrestling Alliance's (NWA) Jim Crockett Promotions. WWF Chairman Vince McMahon countered Jim Crockett's successful Starrcade pay-per-view (PPV), which began airing in 1983, by creating WrestleMania in 1985. After WrestleMania III in March 1987, the most successful professional wrestling pay-per-view event in history at the time, McMahon created Survivor Series, which aired the same day as Starrcade in November 1987. After defeating Crockett in the ratings war, McMahon created the Royal Rumble, a free television special on the USA Network in January 1988, on the same night as the Crockett-produced PPV, Bunkhouse Stampede. The event set a ratings record for the network with eight million households tuning in to watch the event. In retaliation, Crockett created the Clash of the Champions I event, which aired simultaneously with WrestleMania IV. The latter garnered higher ratings, and not long after, Crockett filed for bankruptcy and sold his company to Ted Turner, who rebranded it as World Championship Wrestling (WCW).

As the WWF continued to replace its closed-circuit programming with pay-per-view programming, McMahon added more pay-per-views to the lineup to capitalize on the success of his previous events. In addition to WrestleMania in March, Royal Rumble in January, and Survivor Series in November, McMahon created an event for August, which he named SummerSlam. It was scheduled to be held on Monday, August 29, 1988, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York. To keep the WWF from having a pay-per-view market monopoly, Turner began airing monthly WCW pay-per-views. As a result, both companies brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.

Before SummerSlam, The Honky Tonk Man had been the longest reigning WWF Intercontinental Champion in history. He was originally supposed to defend his championship against Brutus Beefcake, but Beefcake was unable to compete as a result of an (storyline) injury received from Ron Bass the week before.

Also before the event, Demolition (Ax and Smash) held the WWF Tag Team Championship, which they had won at WrestleMania IV after only a year in the WWF; they would defend their title at SummerSlam against former champions The Hart Foundation (Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart), who had become fan favorites a few weeks earlier by turning on their manager Jimmy Hart.

The on-screen feud between Rick Rude and Jake Roberts began weeks before SummerSlam. As part of his gimmick, Rude would—after winning a match—invite a pre-selected woman from the audience to kiss him in the ring. On one occasion, one of the women refused to comply, later identifying herself as Roberts' wife, Cheryl. As the feud intensified, Rude began wearing a pair of tights with a picture of Cheryl stenciled on them, prompting a furious Roberts to charge into the ring and strip the tights off Rude, appearing to television viewers to leave Rude naked, although the live audience saw him stripped to a g-string instead.

For months before the pay-per-view, Hulk Hogan and undisputed WWF World Heavyweight Champion Randy Savage, two of the WWF's top crowd favorites, had feuded with André the Giant and Ted DiBiase, respectively. The two feuds first came together at WrestleMania IV, when—as the result of the vacating of the WWF World Heavyweight Championship—a 14-man single-elimination tournament was set up to crown a new champion. Hogan and André had been disqualified in their quarterfinal match, while Savage and DiBiase reached the championship match; in that final match, Savage defeated DiBiase with help from Hogan to win the vacant title. Savage and DiBiase feuded over the title throughout the spring and summer, but André did not become involved until mid-summer, when he and DiBiase helped instigate a 2-on-1 attack against Savage as he was delivering a promo. Savage quickly recovered and challenged André and DiBiase to a tag team match against him and a partner to be named. That partner was later revealed to be Hogan; the team became known as "The Mega Powers." The André and DiBiase team—which dubbed itself "The Mega Bucks"—retaliated by announcing the guest referee would be someone they declared to be fair and neutral: Jesse Ventura, a color commentator on the WWF's programs who favored the villains, though according to the main storyline, Ventura was chosen by WWF President Jack Tunney as the only person capable of handling such a match.