Intellivision World Series Baseball
Encyclopedia
Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball is a baseball
sports game
(1983), designed by Don Daglow
and Eddie Dombrower
and published by Mattel
for the Intellivision
Entertainment Computer System
. IWSB was the first video game of any kind to use multiple camera angles, and the first sports game presented in a 3D
(as opposed to two-dimensional
) display. The title marked the beginning of the end of board game
style single screen or scrolling
playfield games. It was also the first statistics-based baseball simulation game on a video game console
; all prior console baseball games were arcade-style recreations of the sport.
The game's full formal title (due to licensing requirements) was Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball. It was typically shortened to World Series Baseball in use to differentiate it from the prior Mattel baseball game.
Although IWSB was the first sports game ever created that showed the action in 3D, the underlying mathematical models were not three-dimensional due to the very restricted available RAM
on Intellivision.
Replacing a fixed top-down camera with multiple field-level cameras also allowed the game to show fly balls for the first time in any baseball game, with a ball-sized shadow tracing the ball's path when it was off-screen above the field of view. All prior games showed only ground balls, since the baseball field was laid out to fit the TV screen, much like a pinball game.
storage space available in a machine, and small video game cartridges that held only 4K (later 8K or 16K) of ROM
memory.
Daglow was one of the original five in-house Intellivison programmers at Mattel in 1980, and had written the first known computer baseball
game, Baseball
on a PDP-10
mainframe computer
at Pomona College
in . After completing his first Intellivision cartridge Utopia
in 1981
, he was promoted to lead the Intellivision game development team at Mattel.
He found the right person through the job placement office of his alma mater, Pomona College. Eddie Dombrower was a programmer, animator and classically trained dancer who had invented the DOM dance notation
system on the Apple II
computer as a way for choreographers to record dance moves the same way composers write down music. Since Intellivision World Series Baseball would require far better animations than past video games for its TV-style display, Dombrower was considered to be a perfect fit for the job.
By October 1982
Dombrower had a first screen display running, complete with another first: an inset screen to show a runner taking his lead off of first base. This was the first use of an inset or picture-in-picture display in a video game.
for the position of top video game console
. Although the game was not slated for completion until mid-1983, the company rushed a new TV commercial into production for Christmas, in which Intellivision spokesman George Plimpton
pulled a velvet drape from a monitor and proclaimed the title to be "the future of video games." Mattel's marketing strategy was to dissuade consumers from buying Atari or Coleco
consoles by showing an exclusive new style of Mattel game.
The Video game crash of 1983
wiped out most of the market before Intellivision World Series Baseball ever shipped. Like most video games completed after the spring of 1983, it entered a toy store network that believed the video game era was over and that the games had been a passing fad.
To make matters worse, while the game could be played without the use of the Intellivoice
voice synthesizer
(which was already being phased out due to poorer-than-expected sales and declining user interest), it did require the then-new Intellivision Entertainment Computer System
(ECS) keyboard component. Unfortunately, by the time the ECS was released, an internal shake-up at the top levels of management had shifted the company's focus away from hardware add-ons and almost exclusively towards software. As a result, the ECS was not well-promoted, and neither it nor its companion software titles sold particularly well... and since IWSB was one of the last titles made for the ECS system, very few copies were sold, making it one of the rarest Intellivision titles in the collectors' market.
Daglow and Dombrower went on to create the hit Earl Weaver Baseball
game at Electronic Arts
in , where they more fully implemented the ideas behind Intellivision World Series Baseball. This set the stage for the EA Sports
product line. In the early and mid-1990s Daglow led the development of the Tony La Russa Baseball
games, further refining baseball simulations.
Once the ball was hit, the game switched to a "press box camera" view, where the defensive player could control the fielders and the batting player controlled the baserunners.
When runners were on base an inset window displayed them, and the batting player could lengthen or shorten their lead and attempt to steal.
The game was originally written with a simplified version of Daglow's 1971 mainframe baseball statistical simulation program, so that the MLBPA license could be acquired by Mattel and the game would accurately simulate the play of real Major League Baseball
players. For economic reasons in mid-1983, Mattel withdrew from this plan at the last minute, and the designers were forced to replace actual players with the names of the Blue Sky Rangers
Intellivision game design team.
Other video game "firsts" in Intellivision World Series Baseball are:
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
sports game
Sports game
A sports game is a computer or video game that simulates the practice of traditional sports. Most sports have been recreated with a game, including team sports, athletics and extreme sports. Some games emphasize actually playing the sport , whilst others emphasize strategy and organization...
(1983), designed by Don Daglow
Don Daglow
Don Daglow is an American computer game and video game designer, programmer and producer. He is best known for designing a series of pioneering simulation games and role-playing games, as well as the first computer baseball game and the first graphical MMORPG, all between 1971 and 1995...
and Eddie Dombrower
Eddie Dombrower
Eddie Dombrower is an American computer game and video game designer, programmer and producer. He is best known as the co-creator of the seminal baseball games Earl Weaver Baseball and Intellivision World Series Baseball...
and published by Mattel
Mattel
Mattel, Inc. is the world's largest toy company based on revenue. The products it produces include Fisher Price, Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels and Matchbox toys, Masters of the Universe, American Girl dolls, board games, and, in the early 1980s, video game consoles. The company's name is derived from...
for the Intellivision
Intellivision
The Intellivision is a video game console released by Mattel in 1979. Development of the console began in 1978, less than a year after the introduction of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. The word intellivision is a portmanteau of "intelligent television"...
Entertainment Computer System
Entertainment Computer System
The Entertainment Computer System was an add-on peripheral for the Intellivision. It was Mattel Electronics' second attempt at creating a peripheral to upgrade the Intellivision into a home computer, rushed into production to appease the Federal Trade Commission after they began fining Mattel for...
. IWSB was the first video game of any kind to use multiple camera angles, and the first sports game presented in a 3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
(as opposed to two-dimensional
2D computer graphics
2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models and by techniques specific to them...
) display. The title marked the beginning of the end of board game
Board game
A board game is a game which involves counters or pieces being moved on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two, and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve...
style single screen or scrolling
Scrolling
In computer graphics, filmmaking, television production, and other kinetic displays, scrolling is sliding text, images or video across a monitor or display. "Scrolling", as such, does not change the layout of the text or pictures, or but incrementally moves the user's view across what is...
playfield games. It was also the first statistics-based baseball simulation game on a video game console
Video game console
A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
; all prior console baseball games were arcade-style recreations of the sport.
The game's full formal title (due to licensing requirements) was Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball. It was typically shortened to World Series Baseball in use to differentiate it from the prior Mattel baseball game.
Although IWSB was the first sports game ever created that showed the action in 3D, the underlying mathematical models were not three-dimensional due to the very restricted available RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
on Intellivision.
Replacing a fixed top-down camera with multiple field-level cameras also allowed the game to show fly balls for the first time in any baseball game, with a ball-sized shadow tracing the ball's path when it was off-screen above the field of view. All prior games showed only ground balls, since the baseball field was laid out to fit the TV screen, much like a pinball game.
1980-1981
In the early 1980s, video games were based on models established either by coin-op games' scrolling playfields, or board games' static background images. The screen was either a stable field on which characters moved, or a top-down (sometimes angled) display that scrolled horizontally, vertically or both ways across a larger virtual image. These restrictions were created by the limited memory size of early video game consoles, where a single screen would use up much of the RAMRam
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
storage space available in a machine, and small video game cartridges that held only 4K (later 8K or 16K) of ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
memory.
Daglow was one of the original five in-house Intellivison programmers at Mattel in 1980, and had written the first known computer baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
game, Baseball
Baseball (computer game)
Baseball was one of the first-ever baseball computer games, and was created on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College in 1971 by student Don Daglow. The game continued to be enhanced periodically through 1976...
on a PDP-10
PDP-10
The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966...
mainframe computer
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
at Pomona College
Pomona College
Pomona College is a private, residential, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Founded in 1887 in Pomona, California by a group of Congregationalists, the college moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a hotel, retaining its name. The school enrolls 1,548 students.The founding member...
in . After completing his first Intellivision cartridge Utopia
Utopia (video game)
Utopia is a video game, released on Intellivision in 1981 and often regarded as among the first sim games and god games. It is also regarded as setting the scene for the real-time strategy genre. It was designed and programmed by Don Daglow....
in 1981
1981 in video gaming
-Events:* November -** The British video game magazine Computer and Video Games starts.** Game & Watch - released in Sweden.* Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel found Electronic Games, the first magazine on video games and generally recognized as the beginning of video game journalism.-Notable releases:*...
, he was promoted to lead the Intellivision game development team at Mattel.
1982
While watching a baseball game on TV in the spring of , Daglow realized that the Intellivision could mimic the same camera angles shown in the broadcast. He immediately wrote a proposal for a new baseball game. He received approval from group Vice President Gabriel Baum to start work. No current programmers were free, so Daglow began a search for someone qualified to create this new kind of game.He found the right person through the job placement office of his alma mater, Pomona College. Eddie Dombrower was a programmer, animator and classically trained dancer who had invented the DOM dance notation
Dance notation
Dance notation is the symbolic representation of dance movement. It is analogous to movement notation but can be limited to representing human movement and specific forms of dance such as Tap dance...
system on the Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
computer as a way for choreographers to record dance moves the same way composers write down music. Since Intellivision World Series Baseball would require far better animations than past video games for its TV-style display, Dombrower was considered to be a perfect fit for the job.
By October 1982
1982 in video gaming
-Events:* December 27 - Starcade, a video game television game show, debuts on TBS in the United States.-Notable releases:*October 13 - Mystique releases the Custer's Revenge adult video game for the Atari 2600 home console....
Dombrower had a first screen display running, complete with another first: an inset screen to show a runner taking his lead off of first base. This was the first use of an inset or picture-in-picture display in a video game.
1983
Baum and Daglow showed the prototype to Mattel's marketing department, which was locked in a TV advertising war with arch-rival AtariAtari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
for the position of top video game console
Video game console
A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
. Although the game was not slated for completion until mid-1983, the company rushed a new TV commercial into production for Christmas, in which Intellivision spokesman George Plimpton
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...
pulled a velvet drape from a monitor and proclaimed the title to be "the future of video games." Mattel's marketing strategy was to dissuade consumers from buying Atari or Coleco
Coleco
Coleco is an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as "Connecticut Leather Company". It became a highly successful toy company in the 1980s, known for its mass-produced version of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game consoles, the Coleco Telstar and...
consoles by showing an exclusive new style of Mattel game.
The Video game crash of 1983
Video game crash of 1983
The North American video game crash was a serious event that brought an abrupt end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America. Beginning in 1983, the crash almost destroyed the then-fledgling industry and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing...
wiped out most of the market before Intellivision World Series Baseball ever shipped. Like most video games completed after the spring of 1983, it entered a toy store network that believed the video game era was over and that the games had been a passing fad.
To make matters worse, while the game could be played without the use of the Intellivoice
Intellivoice
The Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module was an adapter for the Intellivision, Mattel's home gaming console, that utilized a voice synthesizer to generate audible speech...
voice synthesizer
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...
(which was already being phased out due to poorer-than-expected sales and declining user interest), it did require the then-new Intellivision Entertainment Computer System
Entertainment Computer System
The Entertainment Computer System was an add-on peripheral for the Intellivision. It was Mattel Electronics' second attempt at creating a peripheral to upgrade the Intellivision into a home computer, rushed into production to appease the Federal Trade Commission after they began fining Mattel for...
(ECS) keyboard component. Unfortunately, by the time the ECS was released, an internal shake-up at the top levels of management had shifted the company's focus away from hardware add-ons and almost exclusively towards software. As a result, the ECS was not well-promoted, and neither it nor its companion software titles sold particularly well... and since IWSB was one of the last titles made for the ECS system, very few copies were sold, making it one of the rarest Intellivision titles in the collectors' market.
Daglow and Dombrower went on to create the hit Earl Weaver Baseball
Earl Weaver Baseball
Earl Weaver Baseball is a baseball computer game , designed by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower and published by Electronic Arts. The artificial intelligence for the computer manager was provided by Baseball Hall of Fame member Earl Weaver, then manager of the Baltimore Orioles...
game at Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...
in , where they more fully implemented the ideas behind Intellivision World Series Baseball. This set the stage for the EA Sports
EA Sports
EA Sports is a brand of Electronic Arts that creates and develops sports video games. Formerly a marketing gimmick of Electronic Arts, in which they tried to mimic real-life sports networks by calling themselves "EA Sports Network" with pictures or endorsements of real commentators such as John...
product line. In the early and mid-1990s Daglow led the development of the Tony La Russa Baseball
Tony La Russa Baseball
Tony La Russa Baseball is a baseball computer and video game console sports game series , designed by Don Daglow, Michael Breen, Mark Buchignani, David Bunnett and Hudson Piehl and developed by Stormfront Studios. The game appeared on Commodore 64, PC, and Sega Genesis, and different versions were...
games, further refining baseball simulations.
Gameplay
Intellivision World Series Baseball displayed the batter and pitcher from a "center field camera" view. One player chose the pitch type, while the player batting chose when to swing, when to take a pitch, and whether or not to bunt.Once the ball was hit, the game switched to a "press box camera" view, where the defensive player could control the fielders and the batting player controlled the baserunners.
When runners were on base an inset window displayed them, and the batting player could lengthen or shorten their lead and attempt to steal.
The game was originally written with a simplified version of Daglow's 1971 mainframe baseball statistical simulation program, so that the MLBPA license could be acquired by Mattel and the game would accurately simulate the play of real Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
players. For economic reasons in mid-1983, Mattel withdrew from this plan at the last minute, and the designers were forced to replace actual players with the names of the Blue Sky Rangers
Blue Sky Rangers
The Blue Sky Rangers are the group of Intellivision game programmers who once worked for Mattel back in the early 1980s.When the Intellivision first came out in 1978, its games were all developed by an outside firm, APh Technological Consulting. Realizing that potential profits are much greater...
Intellivision game design team.
Other video game "firsts" in Intellivision World Series Baseball are:
- The first in-game play by play announcers, presented via IntelliVoice
- The first stadium background music, created by Dave Warhol (who also worked on Earl Weaver Baseball at EA)
- Save/load in a baseball game (through a RAM chip on the cartridge)
- Lineups based on real player stats (although names were changed)
See also
- BaseballBaseball (computer game)Baseball was one of the first-ever baseball computer games, and was created on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College in 1971 by student Don Daglow. The game continued to be enhanced periodically through 1976...
mainframe computer game - Earl Weaver BaseballEarl Weaver BaseballEarl Weaver Baseball is a baseball computer game , designed by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower and published by Electronic Arts. The artificial intelligence for the computer manager was provided by Baseball Hall of Fame member Earl Weaver, then manager of the Baltimore Orioles...
- Tony La Russa BaseballTony La Russa BaseballTony La Russa Baseball is a baseball computer and video game console sports game series , designed by Don Daglow, Michael Breen, Mark Buchignani, David Bunnett and Hudson Piehl and developed by Stormfront Studios. The game appeared on Commodore 64, PC, and Sega Genesis, and different versions were...
- Old Time BaseballOld Time BaseballOld Time Baseball is a baseball computer personal computer game designed and programmed by Don Daglow, Hudson Piehl, Clay Dreslough and James Grove...