Title: MLBPA Baseball (U.S.) Fighting Baseball (ファイティングベースボール) (Japan)
System(s): SNES/Super Famicom, Genesis, Game Gear
Release Date: March 1994 (U.S.) August 11, 1995 (Japan)
Developer: High Score Productions, Visual Concepts (SNES), Beam Software (Game Gear)
Publisher: EA Sports (U.S.), Coconuts Japan (Japan)
MLBPA Baseball is a 16-bit baseball game released in 1994 for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, with a handheld version for the Sega Game Gear coming out in 1995. The Genesis version was developed by High Score Productions, the company responsible for most of the EA Sports catalog from 1993 to 1997, including the Madden NFL series. The SNES version was developed by High Score Productions alongside Visual Concepts, the studio that would later develop the various 2K sports titles.
Coconuts Japan adapted the game for release in Japan a year later as Fighting Baseball, releasing in August 1995. This version no longer held the license to use real MLB player names, so a fascinating and hilarious roster of fake names was used instead.
Gameplay Video
Genesis version gameplay SNES version gameplay Super Famicom version gameplay (as Fighting Baseball)
Description
The game’s U.S. title refers to the Major League Baseball Players Association, the players’ union in MLB. It might seem a little funny to name your video game after a union, but licensing is hugely important in sports games. And this title makes it clear to the educated buyer that MLBPA Baseball has the real MLB players in the game.
Compare this to another popular baseball game released the same year on SNES, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. In Ken Griffey, the only real player name on the rosters is Ken Griffey Jr., with every other player named after random celebrities or fictional characters with suspiciously similar stats and (usually) skin color to the real MLB players at their position on their team.
However, MLBPA Baseball does not have an MLB license. So, while you can hit with Frank Thomas, you’d be playing as “Chicago A,” (A as in American League) not the Chicago White Sox. Ken Griffey had the MLB license, so you’ll see the real MLB team names and logos in that game, but not in MLBPA Baseball. It was rare for any baseball game to have both the MLB and MLBPA licenses until years after 1994.
Because the original release benefited from an MLBPA license, it contained rosters full of real MLB players. But the game did not benefit from that same license when it was released a year later in Japan as Fighting Baseball. So the players needed new names.
There is a long tradition among Japanese baseball video games of rosters with “parody” names, usually replacing one consonant or vowel with a different consonant or vowel in each name, like Ogawa -> Okawa. Fighting Baseball opted for something a little more extreme, creating whole rosters of chopped and screwed versions of real athlete names. Plenty of names are recognizable shuffles of existing players on the team (For instance, the Atlanta roster includes Blavine, Redrosian, and McSriff, all playing different positions than actual Braves players Glavine, Bedrosian, and McGriff).
The strong minority of Russian-looking names reveals that the source for these names included hockey players as well as baseball players, and you may be able to pick out some football names as well. A popular tweet screencapped a page full of these names:
fighting baseball for super famicom. some japanese guy had to come up with a whole league of fake american names pic.twitter.com/4lwzoBpg9f
— Largemann (@lrgmnn) December 27, 2016
Among a certain crowd, Bobson Dugnutt and Todd Bonzalez are famous names thanks to this tweet. The commentary database in MLB The Show includes most of these names, so you can hear Matt Vasgersian introduce your create-a-player as Willie Dustice. You can even buy a Bobson Dugnutt t-shirt. Miketruk.com, created by @HexyLilith on Twitter, randomly generates more fake names like the Fighting Baseball roster screenshot, combining real MLB player names.
Now, some of the jokes around this seem to treat it like another case of poor translation in an old video game and I’ve seen the word “Engrish” applied to this. I don’t see it the same way. The same way that the average American person knows enough Spanish to intuit that “Pablo Sandoval” is a real name and “Dablo Mandogal” is a fake one, the average Japanese person is exposed to a lot of English writing. The screenshot of those names is, after all, a picture of the Japanese version of the game, despite being written in the same letters I’m using right now (for us it’s the alphabet, for Japanese it’s romaji, one of four writing systems used in that language).
I think (but can’t be sure) that the Fighting Baseball roster was not a genuine effort to make plausible-sounding American names. There are easier ways to do that, like what the Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball rosters did, combining famous names from outside the sports world. While an American would never have come up with the same list of fake player names, I think “some Japanese guy” would know that McRlwain is unpronounceable. The developers were probably just having fun.
You can find the full rosters from Fighting Baseball here.
Roster
The U.S. versions of the game uses real rosters, so unfortunately no Bobson Dugnutt. This game’s rosters reflect the end of the 1993 season. For instance, Rickey Henderson plays for Toronto like he did in the second half of ’93, not Oakland like he did in the first half of ’93 or again in ’94.
Let’s remember some guys who are in MLBPA Baseball:
- Ed Sprague
- Pete Incaviglia
- Andy Van Slyke
- Tim Salmon
- Ron Gant
- Bernard Gilkey
- David Segui
- Brad Ausmus
- Frank Viola
- Kirt Manwaring
- Roger McDowell
- Tino Martinez
- Greg Hibbard
- Juan Guzman
Little Details
- The game won’t recognize a hit where a runner was thrown out trying to stretch out a double, or similar situations. It will be scored as if it were a normal out.
- The Tomahawk Chop music will play occasionally as Atlanta batters come to the plate.
- The Sega Genesis version includes what could charitably be called “extremely compressed video cinematics” that play on the scoreboard after big moments like home runs.
- While the SNES and Genesis versions are broadly similar, the Genesis version feels stiffer and the sound design on SNES is better. The Genesis crowd noise sounds like a dial-up modem.
Screenshots
Genesis version:
SNES version:
Super Famicom version:
Game Gear version:
30-30 Club Review
Besides enjoying the Fighting Baseball roster first-hand, not sure there’s anything here worth replaying today. This is the opposite of how I usually feel about these consoles, but for MLBPA Baseball, wish I could get the Genesis color palette with the SNES sound. – Nate