Friday Starter – HardBall on the horizon?

 April 21, 2023  Posted in Friday Starter 275 Views

Atari buys the rights to HardBall

Earlier this week, the current iteration of Atari (there’s a long and complicated business history behind the name) announced the acquisition of a collection of “more than 100 PC and console titles from the 1980s and 1990s.” The full list isn’t yet announced, but among the few games mentioned by name were “notables games from the Bubsy, Hardball, [and] Demolition Racer series.”

Variously styled as Hardball or HardBall or HardBall!, this baseball game series was published by Accolade, a publisher whose name will be under the Atari umbrella now if they want to keep using it. The games started off as unusually action-packed computer baseball games then moved over to consoles for later iterations.

We happen to have covered Hardball twice on the 30-30.club YouTube this week:

It remains to be seen what Atari does with these games, but they seem to be working their way towards some kind of collection of old games or game preservation project. Destructoid points out that Atari recently bought the retro game streaming service Antstream and the preeminent online games database, Mobygames, and their recent game Atari 50 was a combination retro game collection and history documentary.

Baseball games are traditionally hard to include in these sorts of things due to licensing issues, but at least the original HardBall! has no licenses to worry about and could hopefully be re-released in the future.

Just a clip of a big homer by Andruw Jones

I forgot Andruw Jones played in Japan until loading up Prospi 2014 and picking the Eagles randomly. He hit pretty well there, playing first base and hitting 50 home runs in his two years in Tohoku.

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