Midway’s NBA Jam and NFL Blitz are two of the best sports game franchises due to the way they both provide fun, over-the-top experiences that require little knowledge of the pastime in question. The company would eventually set its sights on hockey, boxing, and even professional wrestling, but it never quite got around to releasing a baseball game in the same vein. Or did it?
Thanks to the Video Game History Foundation, we now have one first-hand look on (and ROM downloads for) Power up baseball, which was under development by Midway and Incredible Technologies in the mid-1990s. After discovering a prototype for the game among the deceased developer’s belongings Chris Oberth (whose work helps the organization sustain his family), VGHF co-director Frank Cifaldi spoke to several former Midway and Incredible Technologies employees about what happened to Power up baseball.
“[Power-Up Baseball] had to be exaggerated and extreme and all the good stuff from the 90s, ”art director Alan Noon told Cifaldi. “So the first drawing style I went for was what was pretty trendy at the time with similar shattered fonts and lots of paint splatters and things like that. That kind of look and feel ran pretty much the entire game. “
The main purpose behind Power up baseball was to give America’s favorite pastime its own NBA Jam, a combination of the digitized graphics and sense of humor that made Midway’s basketball game such a hit with Incredible Technologies’ trackball expertise. But while the special pitches and swings would certainly have set it apart from the rest of the crowd, the pace of the baseball just didn’t match with the fast-paced arcade action the two studios envisioned. Power up baseball as well as basketball had in NBA Jam.
“It was too long,” explains programmer Brian Smolik. “We shortened it to maybe three innings or something. And at some point you could buy one inn at a time. And who’s going to play one inning, right? It was great if you could be there for a whole match. But that was like the length of two or three [NBA Jam games], which is difficult for everyone. “
Power up baseball was tested locally in Chicago, building different cabinets and sending them to different arcades, but there was just no market for it. The passion for the project was there, but the developers had overlooked one important factor: how well it would make money for operators. Unfortunately, Power up baseball was canceled and only now it finally sees the light of day thanks to the diligent work of video game historians.
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Make sure to check out the Video Game History Foundation full article On Power up baseball for more details on how this recently excavated project was created, not to mention all the necessary files to view it yourself. VGHF provides full source code and ROM downloads for Power up baseball, and even helped add support for the game to an upcoming version of arcade emulator MAME. What a helpful group!