''Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball'' is a baseball video game (1983) designed by

Don Daglow Don Daglow (born circa 1953) is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known for being the creator of early games from several different genres, including pioneering simulation game ''Utopia'' for Intellivision in 1 ...

and Eddie Dombrower, and published by

Mattel Mattel, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company founded in January 1945 and headquartered in El Segundo, California. The company has presence in 35 countries and territories and sells products in more ...

for the

Intellivision The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. The name is a portmanteau of "intelligent television". Development began in 1977, the same year as the launch of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. In 1984, ...

Entertainment Computer System. ''IWSB'' was one of the first sports video games to use multiple camera angles and present a

three-dimensional Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informal ...

(as opposed to

two-dimensional In mathematics, a plane is a Euclidean ( flat), two-dimensional surface that extends indefinitely. A plane is the two-dimensional analogue of a point (zero dimensions), a line (one dimension) and three-dimensional space. Planes can arise ...

) perspective. It was also the first statistics-based baseball

simulation game Simulation video games are a diverse super-category of video games, generally designed to closely simulate real world activities. A simulation game attempts to copy various activities from real life in the form of a game for various purposes such ...

on a

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to ...

; 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.

History

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 A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to a ...

, where a single screen would use up much of the RAM 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 Intellivision programmers at Mattel in 1980, and had written the first known computer

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding ...

game, ''

Baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding ...

'' on a

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

Pomona College Pomona College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalists who wanted to recreate a "college of the New England type" in Southern California. In 1925, it beca ...

in . After completing his first Intellivision cartridge ''

Utopia A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book '' Utopia'', describing a fictional island socie ...

'' in

1981 Events January * January 1 ** Greece enters the European Economic Community, predecessor of the European Union. ** Palau becomes a self-governing territory. * January 10 – Salvadoran Civil War: The FMLN launches its first major off ...

, 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 is the symbolic representation of human dance movement and form, using methods such as graphic symbols and figures, path mapping, numerical systems, and letter and word notations. Several dance notation systems have been invent ...

system'' on the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-mold ...

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 Events January * January 1 – In Malaysia and Singapore, clocks are adjusted to the same time zone, UTC+8 (GMT+8.00). * January 13 – Air Florida Flight 90 crashes shortly after takeoff into the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, D.C., Un ...

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 Atari for the position of top

. 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 Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 – September 25, 2003) was an American writer. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found ''The Paris Review'', as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. He was also known for " ...

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 Industries, Inc. was an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as The Connecticut Leather Company. It was a successful toy company in the 1980s, mass-producing versions of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game consol ...

consoles by showing an exclusive new style of Mattel game. While the game had been announced by Plimpton in Christmas 1982, Danny Goodman of '' Radio-Electronics'' reported n June 1983 that the game was not ready for release yet. The

video game crash of 1983 The video game crash of 1983 (known as the Atari shock in Japan) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985, primarily in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including ...

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 Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted th ...

in , where they more fully implemented the ideas behind ''Intellivision World Series Baseball''. This set the stage for the

EA Sports EA Sports is a division of Electronic Arts that develops and publishes sports video games. Formerly a marketing gimmick of Electronic Arts, in which they tried to imitate real-life sports networks by calling themselves the "EA Sports Network ...

product line. In the early and mid-1990s, Daglow led the development of the '' Tony La Russa Baseball'' 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 (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL) ...

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. ''Intellivision World Series Baseball'' is also notable for the following innovations: *In-game play by play announcers, presented via Intellivoice *Stadium

background music Background music (British English: piped music) is a mode of musical performance in which the music is not intended to be a primary focus of potential listeners, but its content, character, and volume level are deliberately chosen to affect behav ...

, 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 and skin colour (although names were changed)

References

List of top Intellivision games
*Rielly, Edward J. (2005). ''Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture'', Lincoln, NE:

University of Nebraska Press The University of Nebraska Press, also known as UNP, was founded in 1941 and is an academic publisher of scholarly and general-interest books. The press is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the main campus of the Uni ...