When formulating any ‘Top Ten’ list, it’s important to set the parameters. When you’re talking about PC and videogames this is particularly important. Unlike music, movies, books, and even other forms of gaming, boardgaming for example, time can be exceedingly cruel on electronic entertainment. As technology advances, many of the games of yesteryear look increasingly shallow, ugly, and even comical. This is true with baseball games, as well. Time isn’t always kind.
These selections represent more of a snapshot, a peek at what baseball gaming was like at each specific point in time. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the number one game is better, even today, than the number six game. You need to take yourself back to when these games were released and consider their impact and they’re importance on the day they hit the scene.
Finally, these lists are always going to contain some personal bias—which is part of the fun. There have been a lot of baseball games released in the past 30 years and some classics just missed our cut. Games like Baseball Stars, The World’s Greatest Baseball Game, Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, World Series Baseball, Tony LaRussa/Old Time Baseball, right down the line. Great games all, but they just missed the Top Ten.
Special Honorable Mention: MVP Baseball 05 PC
MVP Baseball 05 is a special case that deserves mentioning before we get to the actual list. The series had a short run thanks to the exclusive licensing deal that removed EA as a player on the baseball scene. MVP Baseball 05 was the last from EA Sports, if you discount its trek into college baseball, which went over like a lead balloon.
MVP came along as the sales and quality of EA’s Triple Play series finally reached Marianas Trench levels. What surprised everyone was that MVP was a different animal – sure it was still EA Sports and that meant that the action was more important than the realism but it was a huge, monumental leap over Triple Play. EA, finally, was taking baseball seriously.
This culminated with the release of MVP 05, a game that tweaked its “pitch meter” mechanic and iron out a lot of the terrible bugs that plagued previous versions. The PC version deserves special note because the mod community turned a good game into something special. This trend isn’t a new one in the baseball genre, as people were looking for a viable alternative after 3DO’s High Heat Baseball fell off the wagon—the PC community shifted to MVP and the results were spectacular – after the community got its hands on it.
If you look at MVP 05 solely on the content on the disk, it’s a good yet still highly flawed game. It wasn’t until the modders actually tooled around with it that it reached its iconic status. This level of modding is also different from what happened with games like High Heat which provided some of the modding tools in its tune file. MVP isn’t in the Top Ten simply because the community went in and fixed the game. Still, it deserves mention because after the mod projects, MVP 05 was excellent.
10. Hardball! - Accolade
In all honesty, Hardball is slightly overrated. Still worthy of a spot in the Top Ten but the series is probably more about innovation than it was true excellence. The original game (which was arguably the best) actually appeared in the classic film The Princess Bride – it’s the game sick little Fred Savage is playing before Grandpa Colombo comes in to read him the book. The original game was released in 1985 on the super popular Commodore 64 system.
