Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr. is Baseball’s Greatest Video Game
Seth Poho made a passionate case for Earl Weaver Baseball II, but Zach Bernard says he couldn’t be more incorrect.
Look. I like Seth Poho a lot. He’s a great writer for RO Baseball and an even better friend. I even edited his piece hailing Earl Weaver Baseball II as the best baseball video game ever made, and thoroughly enjoyed his anecdotal stories mixed in with the history of the game’s development. It was a great piece.
Except for one thing: there’s no way it’s the greatest baseball video game ever, because Nintendo and Angel Studios — now Rockstar San Diego — achieved total perfection on Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr.
In 1998, a substantial amount of video game developers invested in creating baseball games, leading to what would now be considered an over-saturated market. Some games were excellent — EA’s Triple Play series for the original PlayStation was terrific, and All Star Baseball 99 began a severely underrated gaming franchise that spanned seven titles through 2004 — while plenty of others fell short, in many cases extremely so.
And then, like an angel from above, we were treated to Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr. on May 31, 1998. Not only did the game feature baseball’s most exciting player as the cover athlete, but for a six-year-old kid obsessed with his Nintendo 64 console and a new passion for the sport, no game could have come at a more perfect time.
I still get filled with excitement and nostalgia, almost 19 years later, when I pop the cartridge in my N64 — after blowing on its underside for five minutes trying to get it to work — and see this intro:
That’s iconic video game content. No matter how redundant and annoying that song may be now, the hip-hop blended with classic video game synths and traditional baseball organ was cool as hell. Almost instantly, it had more character and aesthetic than most baseball games on the market at the time.
Upon pressing “Start,” the player is taken to the main menu — a blue sky with gameplay options on a rotating baseball: Exhibition, Season, World Series and Home Run Derby. That’s all there is to it. And that’s all it needs.
The mode I relied on — and still do 19 years later — was Season. With ’98 being an expansion year for the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays, you could choose how many teams you wanted as part of the season, from as many as all 30 to as few as 12, in increments of two.
So if you chose, say, 26 teams, your season would not feature the Devil Rays, Diamondbacks, Florida Marlins or Colorado Rockies, and their rosters would be added to the available free agent pool. This was a cool trick for building your team; theoretically, you could add Larry Walker to your team this way with no trouble. The cost is, you lose the Rockies, who were fun in 1998.
This kind of customization, as minimal as it may seem, provided so many layers to season gameplay other games failed to offer. You could also decide the length of your season: “Full Season” (162 games), “Half Season” (81), “Pennant Race” (~30). The greatest downfall of this game is an inability to simulate games, so I often used “Pennant Race.” I still never finished one.
But the very best part of Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr.’s Season mode was the fantasy draft. Games like The Show still offer fantasy drafts, but they’re never much fun; modern baseball games thrive on detail and realism, and a fantasy draft just never feels right in the modern day.
While Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr. offered a lot more depth than its peers on the baseball gaming market, the fact remains it was still an arcade baseball simulator. The customization of how many teams played in a season, how long the season was and the bare-bones style of gameplay made the idea of drafting Ken Griffey Jr. to the San Diego Padres seem far less ridiculous.
Once your team was all set for the season — full ’98 rosters or drafted squad — you were ready for the mode. You could set lineups against lefties and righties even though individual player ratings didn’t account for that, set your five-man rotation and five-man bullpen (another sadly limiting feature, as you couldn’t move a starter to the ‘pen, vice versa), view your schedule and scores from around the league and make acquisitions through trade or free agency.
The most gratifying experience of my entire video game childhood — far more than beating Super Mario 64, Pokémon Gold or Crash Bandicoot — was offering a long-shot trade and seeing the words “TRADE ACCEPTED” on the screen.
You could spend hours building your team, whether that’s restructuring an entire roster in your own vision or trying to recreate an older team — I often worked to recreate the ’97 Marlins — and then you were ready to play.
Gameplay, as previously stated, is very bare-bones. Starters have four pitch options: “A” and “B” were almost always “fastball” and “slider” respectively, while “Z+A” was a specialty pitch (like a changeup) and “Z+B” would was a signature pitch. My favorite “Z+B” pitch was Greg Maddux’s splitter; it’s a strikeout machine if you manipulate it with the analog stick correctly.
Of course, whipping 106 mph “super fastballs” from Randy Johnson and throwing the computer’s timing never got old, either.
When it came to hitting, all you had was a yellow dotted circle and timing. If you played the game enough, hitting became the easiest thing. The size of the dotted circle was determined by your hitter’s “batting” rating, which like all other abilities in the game came from a scale of one to ten.
If you had Mark McGwire on your team, his circle was of average size (like the one pictured above), but his power rating almost ensured good contact would be a home run. Sammy Sosa on the other hand batted .251 in 1997, meaning he had a much smaller circle, but home run power if he connected.
That, in a nutshell, was your gameplay. You’d use all of these factors and information to get through a nine inning game. Simple as that.
There were other things that added to its charm; while games themselves were rather cut-and-dry with little commentary aside from a hilariously deep, baritone umpire’s voice, the artistic design for its time was stunning. Baseball’s ugliest parks at the time — Candlestick, Kingdome, etc. — looked amazing on this game. My favorites to play in were Coors Field and Kingdome.
Players had the same generic facial designs, but batting stances, while limited, represented the actual stances of players nicely, and swing mechanics were smooth and fluid. Exhibition also had fun Easter eggs, like dynamic all-star team rosters, random alternate home jerseys and two hidden teams based on the development teams with Nintendo and Angel Studios.
And of course, the most frequently used cheat code of my entire youth: “left-left-right-right-right-left-left” on the D-pad. Use this during a Griffey plate appearance, and if you make contact, it’s an automatic dinger. Classic.
I’ve played hundreds of baseball video games in my life. No matter what new features The Show is offering or whatever game I feel nostalgic for on a given week, not one has sustained the replay value of Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr. Its simple gameplay and significant customization offerings place it leagues ahead of all its contemporaries.
All jokes aside against my friend and colleague Seth Poho, he made a very good case for Earl Weaver Baseball II as the GOAT, and indeed, customization like that was unprecedented in its time. It took forever to resonate with the modern baseball video game landscape. Now, features offered in EWBII are standards in every release of The Show. There’s a lot to be said about that.
But sometimes, in media and in life, less is more. And no matter what kind of in-depth features Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr. offered, they never felt daunting or overbearing. They were akin to bonus features.
If you’re looking for a fun baseball game with no difficult learning curve, basic gameplay and some fun, optional features on the side that always enhance the experience, Major League Baseball feat. Ken Griffey Jr. remains the perfect video game standard, 19 years after it first hit the shelves.
