GFeature Story
The Triple Play Baseball Multimedia Experience
Triple Play 2002 by EA Sports prepared the studio for baseball greatness, and Triple Play’s cinematic presentation is worthy of praise.
Triple Play 2002, co-developed by Pandemic Games Studio and EA Sports in 2001, is far from baseball perfection, but if we spend a bit of time with it, we can begin to appreciate what it is and what it was. Triple Play’s graphical assets and achievements had value; and they even may have allowed EA Sports to bank those assets and focus purely on gameplay improvements for MVP Baseball 2003 in the following season.
Further, Triple Play has something special going — an intangible that we cannot quite measure. That is, legendary commentator Bob Costas immerses players in its moments with every word. The game’s sound design — and its flare for the dramatic — is largely unmatched by its big brother, MVP.
Thus, although Triple Play 2002 may be the beta to MVP’s alpha build, Triple Play delivers powerful baseball cinematics equipped with emotional pull — a unique achievement for a sports game.
Triple Play 2002's Graphics
Triple Play Baseball 2002’s design team built the 3D foundation to its successor, the greatest baseball game of a generation, in MVP Baseball.
Triple Play’s stadium renderings are quite impressive for its first entry in the PlayStation 2 era. The stadiums, rendered by EA Sports in 2001 on classic Dell PCs with the blocky monitors and all, were digital gold and were added to the studio’s digital library, EA Graphics Library, or EAGL. EA Sports 3D Artist Yves Couturier used ariel shots from MLB, and even used his own digital images of stadiums as reference material to create the designs.
“Baseball stadiums are much more complicated than soccer or football stadiums because they’ve got many more elements inside,” said Couturier in a behind-the-scenes interview published by EA Sports in 2001. “Their architecture is quite complicated. To realize very accurate stadiums, I need lots of reference materials so we’ve got a lot of photos even by MLB and different sources and I also take digital pictures of what I am exactly looking for.”
The attention to detail paid off — Couturier’s stadiums would be the baseball playground(s) for EA Sports’ games for years to come.
Continuing, EA Sports scanned 850 MLB player faces into their database back in 2001 and developed a human skeleton animation framework for Triple Play 2002. “We have a very-complex human skeleton in our game,” noted Min Choi in a 2001 interview published by EA Sports. “It has all the joints and joint rotations that a human has.”
It is with this technology that EA Sports developed life-like swings and movements of the game’s biggest stars. The game features realistic batting stances from star players such as Luis Gonzales, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Barry Bonds to name a few. Notably, the swing animations in Triple Play 2002 are smooth and fluid, possessing water-like properties to their movements. A+.
Notably, the swing animations in Triple Play 2002 are smooth and fluid, possessing water-like properties to their movements.
Lastly on the point of graphics and visuals, Triple Play’s bird’s eye camera view lends a sense of grand scale, similar to watching a game unfold from the press booth of a real MLB stadium. This widescreen view shows off all of the stadium architecture that EA worked so hard on, it adds to Triple Play’s ability to immerse game players.
It is clear that a significant amount of work went into Triple Play 2002, and the digital assets were saved to the EA Graphics Library. Further, if we upscale the graphics with the PS2 emulator to 1080p, the game begins to look like MVP Baseball, all the way down to the player cleats. Hence, the graphics work was unquestionably put in place for Triple Play 2002; and the gameplay just needed further fine tuning — an opportunity that Triple Play provided the MVP team for the future.
Triple Play 2002's Sound Engineering
Continuing, Triple Play 2002’s sound design and its ability to cook up dramatic moments is unmatched from the 2000’s. Legendary announcer Bob Costas is one reason why.
Costas, through his tone and delivery, turns the ordinary into memorable game playing sessions. The announcer is so good that his audio bytes become a key part of the core gameplay. I found myself continuing to play, inning after inning, to uncover more gems from Costas. In this sense, Triple Play is audio experience just as much as it is visual. Costas is the designer of this baseball audio world, and his intonations shape the soundscapes for what would ordinarily be a regular, kind of vanilla, game of baseball. No offense to vanilla, which is highly underrated, but baseball’s dramatic come few and far between to the casual fan. The broadcaster changes the whole attitude and feel for each pitch; he adds these rolling waves of audio texture into the 3D playing fields, injecting meaning into each play.
Each occasional nugget of baseball history that Costas shares feels like a secret between game player, Costas, and EA Sports. In all, Triple Play is a baseball audio game that just so happens to have beautiful stadiums and graphics.
“Costas adds rolling waves of audio texture into the 3D playing fields, injecting meaning into each play.”
MVP’s gameplay innovations are indisputable. Its graphics and lighting— undeniable. But Triple Play 2002 plays well in its own right. A beta to MVP’s alpha, EA Sports had to take gradual steps with its games and technology, and Triple Play was the indispensable warm-up to MVP’s success. Its bright lights and cinematic moments are consumable in quick, byte-sized games, set to the iconic narration of the venerable Bob Costas.
