25 years later, Midway’s lost “MLB Jam” arcade game has been found

Enlarge / Play ball... finally. (credit: Video Game History Foundation)

By the end of the 1990s, you couldn't throw a quarter in most malls without hitting an NBA Jam or NFL Blitz cabinet. "Arcade sports" became a full-blown sensation, and hockey, soccer, and tennis received their own high-speed arcade conversions. But that list of American sports sure seems to be missing its slice of arcade apple pie, doesn't it?

You may have wondered for years why baseball never got an "MLB Jam" equivalent during that golden arcade era. Turns out, the sport got close. Thanks to the Video Game History Foundation, a new ROM has been unearthed for 1996's lost Midway arcade game, Power-Up Baseball, and some of its former devs have explained what exactly happened with its development and cancellation.

A rare pair of trackballs

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  Power-Up Baseball came out only one year before NFL Blitz, but back then, even a single year could be a lifetime in terms of technology. [credit: Midway ]

The story begins with VGHF, which we've talked about at Ars, continuing its dive into a massive pile of unearthed code fragments stored by the family of late games developer Chris Oberth. Today's VGHF blog post points to how this collection mostly focuses on Oberth's personal code contributions to various game projects, as opposed to compiling entire teams' collective code. One project proved an exception to that rule: a single CD-ROM with the word "baseball" handwritten in marker.

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