25 Years Later, Midway’s Lost Arcade Game “MLB Jam” Was Found

In the late 1990s, you couldn’t throw a quarterback in most malls without hitting a NBA Jam or NFL Blitz cabinet. “Arcade sports” became a sensation in their own right, and hockey, football and tennis received their own high-speed arcade conversions. But this list of American sports seems to be missing its share of arcade apple pie, doesn’t it?

You may have wondered for years why baseball never had an “MLB Jam” equivalent during this golden age of the arcades. It turns out that the sport has come closer. Thanks to the Video Game History Foundation, a new ROM has been discovered for the lost 1996 arcade game Midway, Baseball Power-Up, and some of its former developers have explained what exactly happened with its development and cancellation.

A rare pair of trackballs

The story begins with VGHF, which we told Ars about, continuing its dive into a massive pile of unearthed code fragments stored by the family of late game developer Chris Oberth. The current VGHF blog post shows how this collection primarily focuses on Oberth’s personal code contributions to various game projects, as opposed to compiling the collective code of entire teams. One project proved an exception to this rule: a single CD-ROM with the word “baseball” handwritten in the marker.

It was a gold mine for the seemingly lost Midway game, full of source code, art assets, and compiled ROMs. This construction of Baseball Power-Up, dated 1996 and built for Incredible Technologies’ custom 32-bit arcade platform, precedes the eventual “arcade baseball” action of MLB Slugfest 2003 by a considerable margin. (After learning of its existence, Kyle Orland d’Ars did a tricky reverse search on archive.org to see that the game was known, although quite forgotten.)

As part of today’s info dump, VGHF put together a lengthy two-player video (embedded below) showing how the near-full version worked … which unfortunately makes it clear why the game is playing. was never launched at retail. Much of the game was built by the aforementioned incredible tech, an arcade game creator that you might know better as the people behind it. Golden T-shirt, as a Chicago area partnership with Midway. In interviews with VGHF, members of the PUB the design team specifies that we Gold T-shirt– similar look is do not evident in the discovered ROM, and that would have helped with the arcade fun factor of the game: a pair of trackballs built into lots of test cabinets.

“These trackballs were seriously beaten if there were two serious people playing,” says Brian Smolik, programmer at Incredible Technologies. “To throw, the faster you roll that ball, the faster you throw, and the same with the stick. So you had people slapping as hard as they could. It was super intense. office couldn’t concentrate, because in the lobby there are two morons screaming and screaming and beating the devil out of this game. “

“In the end the big mistake”

Enlarge / Members of Baseball Power-Up staff, as members of a team of developers hidden in the game. (We have yet to hear of any other teams hidden in the game, and we are pessimistic to find the Wu-Tang Clan here, given the game launched in 1996. But, hey, we can dream.)

This use of a trackball to roll up and throw or crush throws as home homers has never been otherwise replicated in a baseball game we’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, almost everything else PUB had been done before – and arguably had been done to death on weaker home consoles like Sega Genesis by the time the arcade version of Midway was sent in for consumer testing. An additional “power-up” button allows players to expend a slow-charging energy gauge to launch wild throws or add power to hits, but PUB didn’t follow Midway’s arcade sports streak of letting players break the rules or hustle each other, and the lack of 3D visual polish didn’t help. The game’s only violent exception came from an intentional bean ball option, but it gave the batter a free base instead of paying for the pitcher or otherwise feeling like a NBA Jam jostle.

Project art director Alan Noon points to issues with the game’s 2D engine and its “Mode 7” perspective cheats as some of its duds, as well as the awkwardness of trying to fly a ball or deal with baserunners. (In other words, slamming a trackball to make a home run offered more arcade-caliber fun than running an outfielder on empty ground alone.) Designer John Newcomer explains more clearly why the game stagnated for his testing phase: “You have to bring a certain number of quarters during prime time to the arcade.” He and other staff agree that PUB never figured out how to translate the open nature of baseball, with innings that can go on forever, into something that would swallow up as many quarters in a given time frame as NBA Jam made. Changing the number of innings also didn’t change the basic problem of financial expenses, said the former staff.

The game’s nibbling potential “was the big mistake we made in the end,” Newcomer adds. “We should have understood this from the start.”

Yet as a rare dueling trackball experience, PUB is certainly a fascinating curiosity drawn from the dregs of arcade history, made all the more interesting by its unique recovered ROM. The accompanying oral history doesn’t hurt either, with the accounts of his NBA JamDigitizing process like this and a handy guide to presentations and power-up hits as animated GIFs. VGHF has now appealed for any other version of ROM that might be floating around in the wild, as this one appears to be nearly complete. Whether you have this juicy information or just want to imagine what arcade baseball was like in the 90s, you owe it to yourself to read the full VGHF report, which also includes instructions on how to compile your own version. Game.