A peek inside Saturn-era Sega
Enough with actually playing video games! Why would I want to virtually inhabit the mind and body of Roger Clemens and mow down a computer program pretending to be the 1992 Detroit Tigers? I’ve found something much cooler: Black-and-white scans of dry ’90s business documents about video games!
A trove of Sega of America document leaks from the mid-90s has surfaced on Sega Retro, with a lot of internal information on Sega’s thinking during a console war with Sony’s original PlayStation. There are other news stories if you want to hear more generally what was found in the docs, but we’ll focus on baseball here, which comes up a few dozen times in the documents.
Sega’s World Series Baseball games, with their labyrinthine naming scheme, were key sports titles at the time, widely considered the best-looking and best-playing baseball games of 1994 and 1995. In these docs, there is repeated concern though about timing the launch of World Series Baseball II properly, after the first game in the series had an embarrassingly late release on the real-world baseball calendar (October 2nd, 1995).

The doc above compares sales data between World Series Baseball, released incredibly late in the baseball calendar (this doc says September 29th but other sources say October 2nd) to NFL GameDay, with a football-appropriate November release and much larger sales.
At the time of this document, July 9th must have seemed a realistic target release date, to go along with MLB’s All-Star Game held on that day. Unfortunately World Series Baseball II would slip to an August 24th release date that year, missing the target.

Among the leaks: An unannounced EA Sports baseball game for Saturn?

Probably 1996 software release calendar above was intended to make the Saturn look dominant versus their big rival in Sony’s PlayStation. Look at all those Saturn games and hardly anything on PlayStation! But at least a few things went wrong for Sega after this calendar.
Most interesting is an unfamiliar title called Super Star Baseball by Electronic Arts. EA’s Triple Play 97 would release on PlayStation in June 1996, not long after the planned release date of this mysterious EA Saturn title. EA never ended up putting out a baseball game on Saturn, despite supporting the platform with Madden and many other titles. It sounds like EA was a late defector from Sony’s console for unknown reasons.
Sierra’s Front Page Baseball, scheduled for July 1996 in the calendar, would also never come out. Front Page Sports: Baseball Pro ’96 Season would release for PC only that June.
Slugfest Week Overflow
If you insist on seeing some real pixels and polygons in this column, oh fine: I couldn’t squeeze all the good MLB Slugfest content into just one week. I got a copy of Slugfest 20-04 in the mail last week and squeezed it for all it’s worth:
One meme-y internet phrase comes to mind for me a lot playing Slugfest 20-04: Dudes rock. And it makes me think about the great monolith of current baseball games, The Show.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Sony’s games. Gran Turismo encapsulates a sleek, sophisticated, corporate toy aesthetic than any other game series. Uncharted and The Last of Us are perfect action movies with you controlling the action. Watch any Sony games press conference for the past ten years and you’ll catch their vibe. Competent. Professional. Little bit of a stick up their ass.
Midway, the pride of Chicago, has no such issues. Midway’s NFL Blitz is maybe the greatest cultural expression of football since the old days of NFL Films. Sony made a straight-down-the-middle football game, NFL GameDay, then tried its best to pivot to fun-first action with NFL Xtreme, but they didn’t have their hearts in it.
Midway made Mortal Kombat, a game so righteous that politicians got super mad! I think the only fighting game Sony’s ever made is PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, best-known as “but dearie, we already have Smash Bros. at home.” If a fighting game were going to be in Oprah’s Book Club, this would be it.
All this is to say that while Sony’s MLB The Show is ridiculously well-made, polished in a rock tumbler, and #1 for decades now for good reason… It’s got a little bit of a stick up its ass, doesn’t it? The Show tries to inject a little “let the kids play” attitude in its opening cinematics and with optional home run celebrations, but it certainly won’t let you play as a team of dolphins against a team of clowns. And beating the Franchise mode in The Show won’t get you a cinematic of Mortal Kombat‘s Sal DiVita hitting or berating his employees. What am I even playing for then?
Okay, maybe baseball isn’t the best match for the attitude of an NBA Jam or NFL Blitz, and low brow dude humor wasn’t exactly a rare commodity in the mid-2000s. But looking back on it, Slugfest was unlike anything we’ve got now. And we’re talking video games here! We’re supposed to be having fun!