Midway’s Jam NBA and NFL Blitz are two of the largest sports gaming franchises, due to the way in which both offer fun, excessive experiences that require little knowledge about the fun in question. Eventually, the company would have considered hockey, boxing and even professional wrestling, but it never managed to launch a baseball game in the same vein. Or did he?
Thanks to the Foundation for the History of Video Games, we now have one first hand look to (and ROM downloads for) Power-Up Baseball, which was developed by Midway and Incredible Technologies in the mid-1990s. After discovering a prototype for the game among the things of the late developer Chris Oberth (whose work helps keep the family afloat), VGHF co-director Frank Cifaldi spoke with several former Midway and Incredible Technologies employees about what happened to Power-Up Baseball.
“[Power-Up Baseball] it had to be extremely extreme and extreme and all those good things from the ’90s, ”art director Alan Noon told Cifaldi. “So the original art style I followed was what was pretty fashionable at the time, with similar, broken fonts and a lot of paint splashes and stuff. This type of aspect took place almost throughout the game. ”
The main purpose behind Power-Up Baseball it was to give his own time his favorite pastime Jam NBA, combining digitized graphics and a sense of humor that made the Midway basketball game such a success with Incredible Technologies’ trackball expertise. But while the special pitches and swings would certainly set it apart from the rest of the crowd, the pace of baseball didn’t freeze with the fast-paced arcade action the two studios envisioned for Power-Up Baseball as well as basketball had in Jam NBA.
“It was too much,” said programmer Brian Smolik. “I shortened it to three halves or something. And at some point you could buy one half at a time. And who will play a half, right? It was great if you could be there for a whole game. But that was like two or three lengths [NBA Jam games], and it’s hard for anyone to stay. ”
Power-Up Baseball it was tested locally in Chicago, with several cabinets being built and shipped to various arcades, but there was simply no market for it. The passion for the project was there, but the developers overlooked an important factor: how well it would make money for the operators. Unfortunately, Power-Up Baseball it was canceled and only now does it finally see the light of day due to the hard work of video game historians.
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Be sure to check out the Video Game History Foundation complete writing on Power-Up Baseball for more details on how this recently unearthed project was created, without mentioning all the files needed to check it yourself. VGHF provides complete source codes and ROM downloads for Power-Up Baseballand even helped add game support to a future version of the MAME arcade emulator. What a lot of help!