WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - ESPN Baseball Tonight

Publisher: Sony Imagesoft Developer: Park Place Productions Release: 1994

ESPN Baseball Tonight is the first in a series of ESPN-branded sports games for the 16-bit machines. This is one of four that made it to the Sega CD (National Hockey Night, NBA Hang Time and Sunday Night NFL being the other three). I always thought it was kind of interesting how Sony didn't use league licensing to bring legitimacy to their sports games, rather relying on the ESPN branding to draw all of their sports games together.

Baseball Tonight does feature an MLB license, so players have access to every team in the league. It doesn't, however, feature a players association license, so none of the little digital men who take the field are named properly.

Not that it matter anyway, as the graphics in this game are so bad the players don't resemble humans in the first place.

Baseball Tonight is absolutely horrible. Once you get past the decent-by-1994-standards ESPN intro and appearance by Chris Berman, you're face with extremely mediocre visuals and a baseball game that plays worse than it looks. In fact, the only real plus in the game play department is the above-average animation on the players – they move really smoothly for a game of this vintage.

But I think that may actually be one of the reasons the game is so hard to play. The batter just doesn't react to your buttons presses they way you think he should. And when the ball it hit...yikes. Fielding in this game is downright awful, thanks to the fact that the camera angle never changes from the behind-the-plate batting view, leaving most of the action off-screen as you struggle to figure out which fielding you're controlling and exactly which way you should run for that ball sitting somewhere in the outfield. Not to mention how difficult it is to discern exactly where in the outfield the ball is, as this camera angle offers almost no indication of depth.

The lack of quality is a bit surprising here. Developers Park Place Productions had definitely proven their sports-game chops by this point – Madden Football and NHL Hockey on the Genesis were just the tip of the iceberg on their development resume. All I can think of is that this game was released after their decline and closure.

Park Place Productions is actually an interesting story. This was one of the first super-developers in the industry. Founded in 1989 by Michael Knox and Troy Lynden (who already had an impressive game dev resume), Park Place really made their name creating big sports games for the likes of Electronic Arts and Virgin Interactive.

By 1993 they were the biggest third-party developer in the world, with 130 developers creating 45 games for 14 different publishers. The party was short-lived, though. By the end of 1993, milestone dates had begun slipping and publishers began withholding payments. According to wikipedia, one major publisher that accounted for 30% of Park Place's business pulled their contracts, setting off a chain reaction with other publishers that ultimately ended in the death of the studio. By December 1993, Park Place could not afford to pay its employees. It was also around this time that about 30 of Park Place's employees left to join the newly formed Sony Imagesoft. So I assume most of the work on this game was done just before the death of Park Place.

Troy Lynden is still around today. After leaving Park Place, he began work with the Jesus Film Project, which was the largest missionary organization of Campus Crusade for Christ. There he worked on a plethora of software including missionary CD-ROM programs and iLumina, the first interactive Bible and encyclopedia suite.

Lynden is currently the CEO of Inspired Media Entertainment, otherwise known as Left Behind Games. Gamers will likely remember them for the game Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a real-time strategy game that takes place in a post-Rapture New York City. The game was quite controversial when it was released, being criticized for apparently promoting everything from religious warfare to racism, bigotry, and misogyny.

Good times.