Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
An early look at Slugfest from the VGHF Archive
Buried in the mountain of incredible material from the archive of video game producer Mark Flitman in the Video Game History Foundation’s new archive site are actually several different stages of design docs for what would later be called MLB Slugfest 20-03.
There’s so much behind the scenes information here that it’s hard to know where to start.
The preliminary design doc we have is written by Chip Burwell from Gratuitous Games, who made the Xbox and GameCube ports of Midway’s Slugfest, and it’s full of ideas that never made it to release (to my knowledge?):
- A team of Ready 2 Rumble characters
- A team of “Babes in Bikini’s”
- A Mudville team of players with cartoon proportions
- Special stadiums: A sandlot with motocross bumps and ramps in the outfield, a futuristic space dome with different gravity, and a volcano field
- Special modes: Over the Line, Rounders, a pinball mode, and a very detailed idea called Free Agent mode:
Midway’s own design doc version 4.1 from June 2001 has much more detail on the nuts and bolts and matches the final product more closely, as you’d expect. There are very early screenshots like this one:
And fascinating internal details on how the game works (or was planned to), like this table giving success rates for pick-off attempts:
There’s also this Three Wolf Moon-esque picture of the detailed player faces which I might have to get pressed onto a shirt:
A fight scene planned for Griffey?
We happened to also get a glimpse behind the scenes on Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, the original SNES title, as well this week courtesy of a Bluesky post by programmer Kevin Edwards (no relation).
Kevin worked at Software Creations, the UK-based studio that developed this original Griffey. I’ve added the screenshots from his post below:
These docs show a glimpse of the programming logic necessary to make a baseball game work the way it should. Fielding especially requires a lot of actors taking a lot of actions that are obvious to a baseball player but not obvious to a computer (or someone who’s never played or even watched baseball, like these British devs!).
For those without any interest in the logic of how a baseball game works, the most interesting revelation is that a fight scene was planned in the original design doc, but had to be canceled. Kevin doesn’t specify in his post, but he likes a reply that assumed MLB is who killed the fight scene.
My SABR presentation is now available on YouTube
This past week, I presented a short history of Japanese baseball games and a demo of Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025 for the Society of American Baseball Research’s Games and Simulations Committee. The recording is up on YouTube now. Really proud to have intersected a bit with SABR, which I’ve read and benefited from all my life as a baseball fan.
If nothing else, you might want to skip to 10:55 in the video and see the montage of baseball video game fight scenes, which I enjoyed putting together.
Tokusatsu TV meets Famista
As I brought up in the above video, did you know there was a crossover between Famista / R.B.I. Baseball and Kamen Rider? I didn’t either, until I stumbled into one of the crossover toys while searching Yahoo Auctions for something else. You can see said toys stowed away on top of the utility belt in this screencap from the show below:
The site’s in Japanese, but you can read a lot more detail about this Kamen Rider crossover on the official site here. The episode came out in 2017. The hero transforms into the special Famista superpowered baseball player to defeat some enemy batters and umpires with a magical pitch.
In case it isn’t clear from my description, I don’t actually know much about Kamen Rider. I watched Power Rangers as a kid, and I have watched a decent amount of Godzilla and Gundam, the other two properties included in the Famicom game Battle Baseball alongside Kamen Rider. Nonetheless I welcome it into the R.B.I. Baseball extended universe.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- I stumbled into Baseball Dreamland this week, a channel that plays around with Out of the Park Baseball in some creative ways. I’ve got two of their recent videos to recommend:
- Downtown River City Baseball Story (PC) Gameplay – I talked about this game last week, and here’s a gameplay video. Still can’t believe this Super Famicom title’s getting an official translation so many years later.
- MLB Rivals (PC) Gameplay – Why don’t they release MLB The Show on PC, when so many other Sony titles are making their way over eventually? Well, I dunno, but Com2uS has made the leap to Steam recently, and this video shows what that looks like. Everything works perfectly and it looks decent, though mechanically it’s very much a free-to-play mobile game, spamming you with offers every time you’re in a menu.