We hope you’ve enjoyed this week, as BP has toured the breadth of baseball video games throughout the (modern) ages, from text to lifelike polygonal graphics. We’ll finish off this particular edition with a bit of a departure: Instead of reviewing a single game, we’ll take this opportunity to mourn some of the games that we can’t review, because no one has bothered to make them yet.
It’s a problem for the industry as a whole, but the video game sports genre is particularly prone to staleness born out of licensing exclusivity, roster updates, and engine/asset reuse. Video games are more expensive to make than ever, which makes it harder to justify taking risks and filling niches. But that isn’t the critic’s problem. We aren’t compelled to care about the financial viability of art; leave that to the accountants. We can just talk about what’s there, and what isn’t there. Here, then, are a few baseball games that don’t exist, but should. Because there’s more to baseball than just throwing another coat of paint on Triple Play 96 with a little extra fidelity on Bryce Harper’s hair.
Tickets, Please
Format: Usher Simulation
Inspiration: Papers, Please
Video games had this crisis a while back where people were unsure whether gaming needed to be fun. It’s not something we demand of other forms of entertainment: No one’s giving Hotel Rwanda two stars because it didn’t feel good, or decrying the lack of laughs in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Yet the indie boom of the 2010s brought with it a flurry of games that were too serious for fun, games that had things to say and wanted you to walk around and listen to them. They were, in other words, pretentious, a word people use to dismiss a thing by ignoring the thing and going after its author, usually because the author is waving their arms and telling them to.
Papers, Please is one of the best and least enjoyable of these types of games, a brutal, boring task list of a game that perfectly encapsulated the dehumanization of bureaucracy. It’s hateful and tense and dispassionate all at once. Which makes it easy to apply to baseball’s bureaucrat, the usher.
You play as Marge, the graying, weary overlord of Section 128, tasked with helping the paying ticketholders with their trivial concerns while rejecting the riffraff trying to sneak into a better seat in a half-filled, late-August baseball game. Accost the wrong person and you’ll get a call from your supervisor; let too many freeloaders in and they’ll notice that, too. As with so many of these types of games, the pressure comes from dealing with multiple issues at once. So like so many games, it’s a spiritual descendant of the 1983 arcade game Tapper, a title that is both not art and also less fun than any game trying to be art.
At its root, baseball is a game, but everything around it is work. If video games are ever going to be art, they have to force us to pull somebody else’s crappy eight-hour shift.
Hample Fighter 2000
Format: Home Run Ball Catching
Inspiration: Wrecking Crew
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is coming to streaming next month, meaning that I’ll have to think about it for the first time since I stepped foot out of the theater last spring. As maybe the straightest putt in the history of cinema, the only surprising choice the film made was the inclusion of Foreman Spike, everyone’s favorite Mario character who only appeared in a single American NES game 38 years ago, and not even one with Mario in the title: Wrecking Crew. A puzzle game where Mario is tasked with destroying buildings, Spike acts as Mario’s nemesis, traveling around the other sides of the walls he’s knocking down. He can’t hurt Mario, but he can be a nuisance, destroying a wall that knocks the hero down to the bottom of the screen.
Zack Hample is the Foreman Spike of Baseball. He can’t hurt anyone but he annoys everyone, jostling and knocking people out of the way. This is why we need a video game (OK, admittedly, this is a mini-game) where you, a humble fan in the bleachers, has to fight Hample for a home run ball headed straight between you. Using motion controls, you have to read the flight of the ball, box the villain out, while carefully avoiding knocking down children or overturning beers.
Org Guy
Format: Player Creator
Inspiration: MLB The Show 23: Road to the Show
Not every game has to be a power fantasy. It’s funny to think that, in the early days of the industry, games really weren’t: No matter how well you played, the stages always got harder, the enemies always faster, until you died and had to put in another quarter. It isn’t until the rise of home consoles that games (eventually) discovered that the profit lay in sucking up to the player, giving them permanent upgrades and increasing numbers of tools until the impossible became inevitable. At this point, the DNA of the power curve has embedded itself into the stories themselves; every kid from the two-shack village will inevitably save the world, and every fresh-faced high school kid will Horatio Alger themselves into the Hall of Fame, given enough time and microtransactions.
It’s hard to go back to those early arcade games, because they are a downer. You can’t win because they didn’t even program a win state. But while a sense of progress is necessary (in games as in everything), the fantasy doesn’t have to be power. Not every boy has to save the world.
In Org Guy, you don’t start the game at the age of 18, doing wind sprint mini-games to increase your statistics. Instead, you’re overmatched against 22-year-olds that throw faster than you can see, and you run like you took a bullet in the leg in no man’s land and then returned to the trenches. Instead of becoming a hero, your goal is to hit just well enough to keep your job, and then earn it through all the little things a glorified player-coach has to do: Help the new guys acclimate, flirt with the old ladies with season tickets on the other side of the chain link fence, and mentor a talented kid who got his first sore arm and is just starting to understand baseball mortality.
When you win the game, they cut you. And then hand you a radar gun and a region.
Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Lifted Mitt
Format: FMV Mystery Game
Inspiration: Snatcher, Phoenix Wright, Paradise Killer
It’s hard to describe the FMV craze if you weren’t there for it. But here’s an attempt: In 1991, most kids still were playing their Nintendo Entertainment System, which could display 54 colors, only three on a moving sprite, and would flicker and slow down if it had to draw eight sprites on the same line. In 1994, CD-ROM drives were capable of displaying Hollywood actors in full motion (with a certain level of compression). The possibility space of games burst open… and then slammed shut again, as the cost of playing and developing these games couldn’t justify the terrible acting and stuttering gameplay that CDs provided. The FMV was banished to cutscenes, and gameplay retreated to sprites and Dorito chip triangles.
But the FMV is back, sort of! Indie darlings like Her Story, Contradiction: Spot the Liar, and Late Night have breathed new life into the format, by using their digitized actors as support for a core mechanic, rather than the other way around. This allows us to combine the powers of community theater acting with baseball through another underserved genre: the mystery game. You play as Encyclopedia Brown, the famous child sleuth who shuttered his agency after the tragic case of the death of Sally Kimball. Working as the chief of security for a major league baseball team gives you just enough time each day to relive the horrors before the shift ends and the bar opens, until one day, fate calls you back into service: Derek Jeter’s glove has gone missing. The Boss calls you into his office and lays down a dictum: Find the leather, find the thief, and do it before game time.
To do so you’ll have to gather clues, interviewing witnesses and comparing testimony, and fending off red herrings in true noir fashion, all before putting your suspect on trial before the kangaroo court. Figure out the thief, the method, and the motive, and then fend off his counterarguments and pin him down and win the game and your confidence back.
***
There are more baseball games out there to make other people make, and we’ll return to them next time Make-Up Games comes around. For now, we’re stuck with what we have, which is more content than anyone could possibly consume in a lifetime of lifetimes. Future generations will pity us for two-dimensional, anti-immersive video games even as they rue us for our free water and the fact that we could still “own” games without paying mandatory weekly fees. Still, the present is a hell of a time, as long as you have the imagination to make life and baseball and video game baseball more than just a roster patch on last year’s edition.
Thank you for reading
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