Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
VR Baseball interview
A few weeks ago, Dan Bright left a comment on my YouTube channel with a funny story about VR Baseball ’97, a baseball sim for the original PlayStation and PC.
“Worked on this game first year out of college,” Dan said. “It was so much fun. Got to work on the general manager portion (schedules, stats, teams). Came up with the idea of inserting an All-Star Game based on votes. The line of code I’m most proud of… If (player_id == 283) votes = votes / 2. Translation: If the player is Roberto Alomar, reduce his All-Star votes by 1/2 (spit on the ump that year).”
After reading this comment, I simmed through a couple seasons in VR Baseball ’97 and was impressed. The sims run lightning fast, with a full season going by in just 35 seconds. And the team records and leaderboards all look reasonable.
Dan Bright with the Hawaii Five-O reference in the credits. 
Sure enough, Roberto Alomar despite strong stats has about half the votes of the league-leading totals at 2B. 
Here are the league leaders in All-Star voting at 2B. 
Stats for Mike Mussina. I love the “2nd in ML wins, 4th in ML ERA, leads AL in CG” bits. 
Paul O’Neill’s individual stats. Again, top 10s in categories get added to player pages. 
Paul Molitor won the batting title with a strong .361 batting average. In the real 1997, Tony Gwynn won with a .372 average. 
The league’s best pitchers had ERAs that were a bit too low, though the low 2.00s were common at the time. 
The Atlanta Braves set the Wins record. In real life, they won 101 games.
I reached out to Dan to learn a little more about his work on the game. Here’s what he told me:
Q: If you remember, I’d love to hear a description of how the game/season sim functionality works. I tried to find some stats to nitpick, but the numbers all looked reasonable to me except the very best pitchers had unusually low ERAs and Bernard Gilkey was a big star (he was amazing in 1996, so it makes sense). Are the stats that get simmed based on player attribute numbers in-game, or based on 1996 statlines maybe to make it a bit easier?
A: The simulation was actually a funny story. I coded the schedule to come up, and we had our main game engine engineer allow the game to be played in “sim” mode, which would not show the GUI but rather just run the game from start to finish.
For the first test using that, it took about 10 minutes to run per game. Doesn’t seem bad, but 2400+ games X 10 minutes, that means ~6 1/2 hours to complete. I offered to write a random “dice” simulator for the games, taking a weighted rating for batters and pitchers and doing a full simulation with random numbers. We had ratings for all players for the season provided. In other words, it was a glorified D&D-style dice simulator that executed a complete game. There were little details, like runners who got on base would advance extra bases based on speed, etc.
Q: What else did you work on besides the General Manager mode?
A: I also was put in charge of the batter-pitcher AI at the time. I think they figured that I had success with the sim, so I could bring some of that to the gameplay between pitchers and batters. We had ratings for the pitchers’ best 3, 4, or 5 pitches. The pitcher would throw his better pitches more often, and especially if they had runners on base.
The batter design was pretty cool. A batter’s rating determined how many pitches back he could remember the pitcher throwing. If the batter was Tony Gwynn, he could remember 35 pitches back and determine the likelihood of the next pitch. Whereas a batter like Scott Brosius could only remember 4 pitches, making it harder to predict. I was really surprised it worked as well as it did. We had 50+ testers for the game and it took them playing weeks continuously before someone finally pitched a no-hitter against the computer batters.
Q: VR Baseball ’97 is the first in its series. Do you know to what extent this game had to be developed “from scratch” and if so, any memories on what the development timeline was? I’m curious about this because we so rarely get baseball games that aren’t iterations on a long-running series.
A: The game was made from scratch. The 3-D engine was developed by Daryl Hawkins from scratch. Our timeline was pushed pretty far. We were supposed to be out for Christmas. I don’t remember how late we were but it took a while to complete the game. [The game was initially announced with the title VR Baseball ’96, but ended up not coming out until April 1, 1997. The PC version released in July 1997.]
Q: What was it like working on a game like this straight out of college?
A: For a kid right out of school, it was a dream job. I applied because my girlfriend at the time applied and got a job there as a programmer. It was my first serious interview where they went into problem-solving questions. It was by chance that I was given a 2 page text description of the general manager (here’s what it should be) outline. Hardly a spec.
There was another developer that started the same day. He received a War and Peace-sized book on programming for the Sega Saturn. He was tasked with helping to port the game to the Sega Saturn. I felt bad for him, it was daunting. He lasted two weeks and then didn’t show up, no resignation letter, no call. [The Sega Saturn version was never released.]
The pay vs. hours were crap, but I didn’t care.
Q: Did you meet any interesting or famous people while working on the game?
Having Mike Piazza come and test the game was really cool. He came in, tried it and gave us feedback. I had a PlayStation on my desk and I could just compile, deploy and test from my computer screen. Pretty cool stuff for the time.
My scariest moment was when we had Pat O’Brien (the sports broadcaster) in to do a voiceover commercial for our product. Problem was, the general manager was crashing. It was my code, and Pat was getting impatient. Took me 2 hours and I finally tracked down the issue to some uninitialized variables. Up to then, the worst 2 hours of my programming life, when you have execs in your office looking over your shoulder.
Thanks to Dan Bright for getting in touch and answering my questions!
New Japan-only mobile game with both NPB and MLB licenses
Fantastic Baseball is a mobile game that release globally last year with licenses for MLB and the Korean and Taiwanese leagues. The game’s publisher Wemade has added another license to its collection this year with NPB in a spin-off game called Fantastic Baseball: Nichibei Pro, released in Japan only at this time for iOS and Android.
The game came out in May of this year, and includes both NPB (the Japanese league) and MLB teams and players. I have yet to play it, but it definitely looks similar to the standard Fantastic Baseball game, but with a new set of players to collect for your in-game squads.
“Nichibei” means “Japan – U.S.” There was a PS2 game by Squaresoft called Nichibei Pro Yakyuu: Final League released in 2002, which tried to work around the lack of an NPB license by combining a strong custom team system with licensed players from MLB.
Song of the Week
This is “Rockies Anthem” by 3OH!3, an electropop riff on “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” that spells out Colorado then yells Rockies. A beautiful, heinous artifact from the 2000s.