The Baseball Video Games of 1994

I noticed since childhood, probably by three years after, that there were so many baseball video games made in 1994, along with the American League-licensed movies Little Big League, Angels in the Outfield, and -- as I didn't learn until much later -- Major League II.

As for the video games, here are the ones for the consoles and a quick write-up for my memories of each.

MLB & MLBPA LICENSE

World Series Baseball (Sega, Genesis) - Can't relate anything about this game at all because I didn't have a Genesis in my elementary school years.

MLB LICENSE, BUT NO MLBPA LICENSE

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (Nintendo, Super NES) - For a while, the only baseball game we owned. My perception of the leagues and my first exposure to the new logos came from here. Editing player names was definitely a plus.

ESPN Baseball Tonight (Sony Imagesoft, Super NES) - Only rented this one a time or two, learning the name "I'll Never Be Your Beast of" Berman.

MLBPA LICENSE, BUT NO MLB LICENSE

MLBPA Baseball (EA Sports, Super NES & Genesis) - I liked the music, the scoreboard, and that team select menu. Hearing the Chop for the Cleveland team was a memorable moment. This was a rental for us.

Tecmo Super Baseball (Tecmo, Super NES & Genesis) - Finally, a game that had the National stars in red and the American stars in blue (I liked red and the NL better). The music was cool to me, and I liked how they handled shorter seasons by staggering games. A rental.

Super Bases Loaded 3 (Jaleco, Super NES) - It had its own thing, but I guess I preferred SBL2 because of its presentation. A rental.

HardBall III (Accolade, Super NES) - By the time I rented this one, it was late enough for me to buy New York and make them Tampa Bay because Boggs was there.

RBI Baseball '94 (Tengen, Genesis) - Again, no Genesis.

NEITHER MLB NOR MLBPA LICENSE

Super Bases Loaded 2 (Jaleco, Super NES) - The numbers on the backs of jerseys, the unique camera, and the edit teams made this a frequent rental and eventually a title I owned.

Sports Illustrated Championship Football & Baseball (Malibu Games, Super NES) - Rented it one time. I remember one of the football players' names was C.Schultz and that the baseball players had no names. That's about it.

Relief Pitcher (Tengen, Super NES) - I don't even remember seeing it on video store shelves. A compilation video many years later is where I learned it existed.

Super Baseball 2020 (Electronic Arts, Genesis) - The SNES port from '93 was a 21st-century pickup for me. By then, the controller was out of whack.

TO CONCLUDE

The baseball video game market really picked up. Was some of it because both sides were expecting a strike? Was it part of the cause of the strike? Or were this wave of baseball video games and the real-life players' strike just coincidental?

Whatever the case, 1994 gave us all of these baseball video games and several more.

Celebrating 90 Years of Arcade Baseball

The All-American Automatic Base Ball game was first shown to the public in 1929. The machine gave the player a lever to control the bat, which may have been the predecessor of pinball's flipper. It kept track of balls, strikes, outs, and runners. It counted called strikes and foul strikes. It had the pitcher pitch both balls and strikes, and it positioned an umpire behind him to signal the call with his arms.

The names of some period players were used. Before the advent of the All-Star Game, these teams were made up of players from a mixture of the two leagues.

The mechanical baseball game was shown in a 1929 issue of Popular Mechanics and written about in a 1930 issue of the coin-op magazine Automatic Age. A new version for 1931 was advertised in Automatic Age.

George Miner filed his patent for the apparatus near the beginning of 1932, and it was granted near the end of 1936. Unfortunately, Miner had died in a plane crash a year before.

The game lived on and became Rock-ola's 1937 World Series. By then a few other bat games had been made, but this one is the father of all arcade baseball.

Flippers were introduced for pinball in 1947, an innovation that changed the coin-op game business for the better. In what might not be a coincidence, Williams made its first of many baseball machines that year, a line that ended with that Slug-Fest machine I enjoyed at an Outer Banks boardwalk in the '90s.

LINKS TO VIDEOS
A restored version of the 1929 game being shown off
A quick look at the 1937 arcade machine
Fifteen-minute video, the first six minutes being the 1937 game in action (the same channel also has part 2 of the technical descriptions and a 40-minute video on how it differs from an earlier model)

EDIT 10/21/19: Added two words that were missing. Also, removed one parenthetical aside.