Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

In 1992, Nintendo revolutionized a game. This did not happen with respect with video games, but rather involved a move in the sports world: namely, Nintendo's purchase of the Seattle Mariners. With this purchase, the Mariners became the first Major League Baseball team owned by foreign investors. Now the game that purported to be as American as apple-pie and gun violence had Japanese ownership woven into its fabric. So revolutionary was the move that not all major league owners were on board with it. In fact, the final vote among the owners to approve the sale went 25-1, with the Cleveland Indians ownership backing out. Should we surprised, though, that a team named after and marketed around a racial caricature would be xenophobic with respect to welcoming East Asian proprietors into America's pastime?

One person who was definitely not unenthused with the move was Hiroshi Yamauchi, the venerable then-president of Nintendo. In fact, the usually inscrutable Yamauchi was over the moon at the idea of being part-owner of an MLB team. So excited was he at the Makuharu Messe convention in Tokyo in 1992 that, during his keynote address in which he detailed future prospects for the Super NES, he spontaneously announced that he had not only bought the Mariners, but that Nintendo was in the process of making the greatest baseball video game ever made. This was news to the various development ingénues in attendance, including none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. The announcement also confused Tony Harman, Nintendo's director of development and acquisitions, a former college soccer star who had parlayed a baccalaureate of engineering and a master's degree in business into a job as game reviewer for Nintendo Power. Not the least of his difficulties was the fact he didn't speak Japanese. Sitting in the presence of Nintendo's virtuosos, Harman turned to Miyamoto and asked him to dispel some of his confusion by translating. With his limited English, Miyamoto explained that the baseball game Mr. Yamauchi had reference was not only not in development, but that none of the old masters, including Miyamoto himself, had even heard of the game. Over and above that, none of the development doyennes wanted to tell Yamauchi that there was no such game in development, as they would likely be the ones entrusted with rushing the game into production. Harman asked who would be overseeing this game. And then, if the account in Blake J. Harris's Console Wars is to be believed, Miyamoto turned to Harman and said, altogether jokingly, "you." This occasioned laughter from Nintendo’s mavens, but it spurred Harman into action. Harman was going to design the greatest baseball game ever made.

That quest led to the development of Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, released for the SNES in 1994. The reins were taken up by Software Creations, a developer based in Manchester, England, a curious choice given that baseball is a cultural non-entity in Britain. The baseball game that resulted unmistakably shows its British—or at least non-American—influences. America's pastime as depicted in this game looks and plays like a funhouse simulacra of itself. Many a hitter has a massive upper-torso, all bicep and chest, with a bony lower half, making for an excessively cartoonish look that may have been an attempt to satire steroid fueled baseball of the 1990s (and beyond). More egregiously, pitches can be controlled after they are thrown, making pitching an excursion into magical realism. The pitcher-batter encounter, then, is essentially reduced to a showdown between a muscle-bound monstrosity of human growth hormone and a horsehide-hucking wizard. In this version of baseball, everything is turned up to eleven. Gum-chewing batters blow bubbles insouciantly. Strike out victims break bats over their knees, shouting churlish complaints to the umpire. Every fly-ball springs off the bat, soaring high over the vast green tundra of the outfield, from which every single throw returns to the infield without a bounce. Given its international origins, the game must inevitably be read as a commentary on America. Through the combined efforts of the Japanese inceptors and British developers, what has resulted is a counter-Orientalist—or better yet intra-Occidentalist—parody of baseball. It is definitely a vision of baseball inflected with Anglo-European sensibilities of the absurd. As a result, it makes baseball look absurd. Apparently, for Nintendo's Japanese development brass, the laughs just wouldn't stop.

Bizarre aesthetics aside, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball is simple enough to pick up and play, and even the baseball neophyte—your average Britisher, perhaps—will be jacking warning-track blasts right from the very outset. The game is not, however, easy, and the computer is a more than formidable opponent who can readily put a crooked number on the scoreboard if your pitches are imprecisely maneuvered after they’ve left your hurler's hand. Be prepared: you will more than occasionally lose by double digits.

Nonetheless, there are ways in which Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball grows on you. All the MLB teams and logs are here, but the players are fictional, as the game does not have an MLBPA license. This is not entirely to the game's discredit, however, as the developers did not go with the usual generic renaming scheme as per other unlicensed sports titles. Rather, the developers provided each team with themed player names. Some of these are baseball related, as is the case for the New York Yankees, who have the sobriquets of famed Bronx Bombers, such as W. (Whitey ) Ford and T. (The) Bambino, as well as names of New York boroughs such as S. (Staten) Island. Other teams have names drawn from the world beyond baseball. The Colorado Rockies are all horror movie mainstays, including G. Romero, B. Lugosi and B. Karloff. Tom Savini takes the place of pitcher Bruce Ruffin; personally, your correspondent prefers a baseball game where practical effects genius Savini is pitching instead

Lux Interior trades his high heels for cleats

of Ruffin. Wouldn't that make for a more interesting major league? At least two teams are filled with the names of punk and rockabilly impresarios, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, which features members of The Dead Kennedys and The Cramps, among others. With the inclusion of an edit mode, the game allows the player to change these names, but why would you? Imagine the thrill of scratching out a hit with Cramps frontman Lux Interior, the man who, with jaw unhinged, performed the most profoundly surreal cover of the already psychotic Hasil Adkins classic "She Said." What other baseball game allows you to do that?

There is one player whose name cannot be changed, and that is, of course, cover-boy Ken Griffey Jr. of the Mariners, the only real baseball player in the game. Curiously enough, Griffey was not a lock to appear in the game, even after Nintendo had purchased the Mariners. Griffey was, in fact, in talks with Sega about appearing in a prospective baseball game for the Genesis right up until the verge of Nintendo's 1994 SNES release. We can only speculate as to what the effects would have been on the ongoing console wars had Griffey signed with Sega. Indeed, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball would go on to sell well for the SNES, and the family-friendly, child-like "Junior" surely had much to do with that. A middling, cartoonish game of baseball by any other name would probably not have fared so well.

What resulted from Tony Harman's toil was certainly not the greatest baseball game ever made. Nintendo may have revolutionized baseball ownership, but Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball did not do the same for video game depictions of baseball. Nonetheless, the game is worth playing to experience a parallel universe ruled by comic-book physics and baseball players who are HGH-infused avatars of truly cool people: punk rockers, horror heroes and American presidents (see the Kansas City Royals). Now that is what revolutionary truly looks like.