This is a website about baseball video games by Nate Edwards. You can email me at 30dash30dotclub@gmail.com.
Baseball video games are in a tough spot for video game preservation for a few reasons:
- Most baseball games depend heavily on license agreements with leagues or players unions. These agreements don’t last forever. That prevents official remakes or re-releases of these games, unless the developer does a lot of new work to strip all the licensed content out or replace the rosters. This is part of why license-less games like RealSports Baseball and Bases Loaded have come out in retro game compilations recently but R.B.I. Baseball hasn’t.
- Video game preservation is still mostly a hobbyist field. Although sports games have always been popular, it seems that the kind of supergeek who maintains video game databases, produces fan translations, and makes patches for playing old games on new hardware usually isn’t obsessed with sports games.
- Baseball games are split pretty evenly between North American and Japanese releases. Surprisingly few games were made for release in both regions. To tell the story of baseball video games, you need to know both baseball and yakyuu.
So that’s why this site is for preserving information about baseball video games and helping others either relive their favorite childhood title or discover a new way to play around with the sport they love.
Transliteration Note
There are a ton of baseball games that were only released in Japan (and a few Korean and Taiwanese ones). In order to treat the titles of these games consistently when they usually have no official English title, here are the rules I try to follow (To be clear these are all style choices for this site among various correct options on how to do this.):
- Japanese words are transliterated, not translated. I would love to come up with my own translations for each title, but my translation could differ from anyone else’s, and it’s more important to make it clear which game we’re talking about, both for clarity and for search engines.
Example: Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu, not Live Powerful Pro Baseball
Note: This includes games like Pro Yakyuu Spirits that sometimes have an English translated title somewhere in-game or on the box art (Professional Baseball Spirits) but were never released in an English-speaking country.
- English loanwords are given with their native English spelling rather than following the Japanese pronunciation like romaji would.
Example: ベースボール is transliterated here as “Baseball,” not “Beesubooru.”
- This site avoids diacritics in favor of word processor-style romaji, both for my sanity in typing these titles over and over and to match the most common spellings throughout the internet for these game titles.
Example: The long U at the end of 野球 is transliterated here as “Yakyuu” rather than “Yakyū.”
- There are some particles in Japanese where the hiragana character used to write them doesn’t match the actual pronunciation. Some places online will spell them the way the hiragana is usually pronounced. Here we spell them the way the particle is pronounced instead.
Example: 栄冠はキミに is transliterated here as Eikan Wa Kimi Ni (matching how the title is pronounced) rather than Eikan Ha Kimi Ni (which matches how the title is written in Japanese).