Fans booting up MLB The Show 2017, out today for the PS4, will, amid the carefully honed franchise modes and Road To the Show, discover what appears to be an odd tribute. There’s a complete, note-perfect modern take on the Super Nintendo classic Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. And it’s not only a good time, it’s a reminder that baseball games could have taken a very different path.
There was no shortage of baseball games for the Super Nintendo in 1994. But while games like Super Bases Loaded, a game full of bizarre ad parodies, were fun, they were also largely made up out of whole cloth. At the time, baseball games tended to be endorsed by a single player, like Cal Ripken Jr. or Nolan Ryan, and they were the only real player in the game. Everybody else was fictional, sometimes thinly so, and generally it was so difficult to get a license from both the MLB and the player’s union most developers threw up their hands, signed a player, and just winged it on the rest.
And Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball has that problem in a sense; Griffey is the only named player in the game. But Software Creations, a British developer that had mostly made its name porting arcade games to consoles, decided to make up for it by getting the details absolutely right while making the gameplay, well, not exactly sim-accurate.
The player rosters are a good example: The names are fake, but the statistics are real, and the game offers a name change feature for each team. More to the point, though, they’re real teams; after years of going up against the Motor City Felines and the Los Angeles Cherubs, players could finally play the real teams with their real rosters. The developers couldn’t fit every ballpark onto a Super Nintendo cartridge, but those that were there were as accurate as 16-bit tech could make them, right down to Fenway’s Green Monster and Dodger Stadium’s slants. They even put Joe Buck in the booth, to make it feel as much like a game as possible.
That said, it was hardly a sim; the franchise, which would go on for four games, let you mess with the ball after you’d thrown it, for example, and it was full of silly sound effects and other light-hearted touches that to this day don’t exactly win the hearts of exacting sim fanatics. Still, it was more than enough to win the hearts of gamers; it sold 1.2 million copies, much to the surprise of all involved.
When you boot up Retro Mode on MLB The Show 17, it’s easy to see why. The game has aged well over the last 20 years. Sure, it’s not the far more accurate game sitting elsewhere on the disc, and there are some tweaks to the controls. The pitching is slightly more rigorous than just “hammer the arrows on the control pad,” most notably, so you can’t last-second force the ball over to cheat somebody out of a home run. But it’s still the Super Nintendo game you remember, and you can even play it with the sprites of the original. In a nice touch, playing Retro Mode counts towards your overall experience level in the game. For context, as you play the game, you level up your overall experience, which unlocks little perks around the game, particularly in Diamond Dynasty. So if you’re not particularly interested in being a manager or playing the deep RPG that is Road To The Show, you can still keep up with friends.In many ways, MLB The Show as a franchise owes a debt to the Super Nintendo’s goofy, nerdy take on ’90s baseball, and it’s nice to see a classic get its due.