Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Pro Yakyuu Virtual Stadium and what eventually became Triple Play 97
While digging into Triple Play 97 a year or two ago, I ran into an odd song on the music select called “Acid Jazz.” You can listen to it here. The main lyrics are a Japanese woman saying “Virtual Stadium. Virtual Stadium baseball game.” Seemed like an odd thing for an MLB game.
After a little research, I found this track was made for a Japan-only EA Sports baseball game: Pro Yakyuu Virtual Stadium. I wasn’t aware of any other cases like this, where a western studio made an NPB game, and never made an MLB or English-language version. Why was EA developing a Japan-only game for the 3DO console at all?
To put it very briefly, Trip Hawkins is the reason this game exists. Trip was the founder of Electronic Arts and The 3DO Company. He was still on the board at EA while working to launch his console project. So Electronic Arts put plenty of work into games for the 3DO.
Pro Yakyuu Virtual Stadium is a good baseball game! Its only fault is being for the 3DO. The 3DO was an ambitious console that tried to deliver cutting edge power at a premium price point. In the U.S., this strategy failed. Games slated for the console’s release had to be delayed, as technical details on the hardware changed up until the last moment.
In Japan however, the console launched a little more promisingly (before PlayStation and Saturn would eventually wipe it off the map there as well). So there was a point, when decisions are being made in 1994, where Japan was a promising place to release a baseball game on 3DO but North America wasn’t.
I went so far as to buy a 3DO recently in order to try the game out. The recording above is off of real hardware. I also snagged a copy of the similarly-named Pro Stadium, the other Japan-only baseball game for 3DO.
The game runs well for being on new hardware and trying something few baseball games had done before. You have to consider it in its context. The vast majority of baseball games released in 1995 are still using basic 2D graphics. I love the look, but for an industry obsessed with finding the next level technically, only Jaleco’s Bases Loaded ’96: Double Header is even attempting a 3D look.
Virtual Stadium fakes a 3D look with its player models, using pre-rendered sprites a bit similar to Donkey Kong Country. But the playing field is real live-rendered 3D, with a camera that swoops from one viewpoint to another to show off the changing geometry. Plus, each game starts with a nice (pre-rendered) 3D cinematic of the stadium exterior.
The audio is also impressive for the time, though the ouendan music is a little too sporadic compared to a real NPB game. Most of the time you’re hearing a generic crowd roar. The drums and horns only come in when they feel like it. The stadium PA announcer is impressive tech for the time, reading every player’s name as they come to the plate.
Both games got some English-language coverage from the UK 3DO Magazine below, where it was hilariously sidelined and compared negatively to Sanyo’s Pro Stadium. Speaking about Sanyo’s game, they say “If the finished game ups the frame rate, this could be another home run.” Well, they very much did not up the frame rate… It was an era where screenshots drove enthusiasm, and they could be forgiven for thinking surely Sanyo wouldn’t release a game that runs at single-digit frames per second.
All that work on tech development for 3DO would never be worth releasing in North America, but EA Sports put that work into Triple Play 97: Virtual Stadium Baseball, which released the next year on PC and the Sony PlayStation. A Sports Illustrated writer got in touch in 2016 with Erik Kiss, a developer on both Triple Play 97 and Pro Yakyuu Virtual Stadium. He confirmed that the 3DO sales numbers in the U.S. killed any hope of localizing the first Virtual Stadium game.
You can see more material for Pro Yakyuu Virtual Stadium, including a full scan of the manual and screengrabs of ads, previews, and reviews from various magazines on the 30-30 encyclopedia page for the game.
Konami and Cygames settle lawsuit over Umamusume and Power Pros patent
To close the book on some previous legal news covered here, Konami and Cygames have settled their patent infringement lawsuit(s).
Konami alleged that Cygames’ popular anime horse-girl racing game Umamusume: Pretty Derby infringed on patents they held relating to the Power Pros / Pawapuro series of baseball games. This settlement doesn’t include any new details on the lawsuit or the settlement terms, so all we know now is this fight is over (and Umamusume will continue to exist).
Konami are notoriously litigious and prone to patenting everything, but… Anyone familiar with the Success Mode in Power Pros can see huge, structural similarities to the gameplay of Umamusume.
In a way, it’s funny that the lawsuit focuses on very specific patented mechanics that don’t resonate as something that should be intellectual property… “An event associated with a first character which is set by a user is generated by satisfying a predetermined condition, manages a game in which a parameter of the second character is varied in accordance with[…],” blah blah blah. All that specificity feels silly when holistically, the mechanics of these two games are so similar.
These are two anime-styled sports sims where you create and level up a character by choosing one of five training options (or resting), boosted by a random assortment of your friends and former created characters, interspersed with visual novel segments that vary based on which friends you chose to bring along. Then the only big difference is the actual matchday in Umamusume is a simulated horse(-girl) race, versus Power Pros which lets you control a baseball player.
That all being said, I’m not a fan of video game patents. If your company can make Power Pros gameplay more popular by adding horse-girls, then great. You should be able to do that. There is a balance here, but a world with more patent protection is probably a world with worse games.