Baseball videogame fans have much to rejoice today. Following 2KSports’ decision not to renew the MLB license, MLB itself has announced they themselves will be making a new baseball game to release on all possible platforms –a new RBI Baseball game, to boot.
Late night announcement for video game fans from MLB Advanced Media. @RBIGame #RBI14 pic.twitter.com/kUNvSkIrat
— MLB Public Relations (@MLB_PR) January 15, 2014
RBI Baseball was originally a localization of Pro Yakyu Family Stadium, developed by Namco, from the Family Computer to the NES. The 1988 slugger is remembered for being the first baseball game to license the names and likenesses of the MLB players, which was licensed separately from the MLB itself at the time. Namco made full use of the license, giving players stats that appromixated their real life abilities and records.
Subsequent iterations of the series were not going to match the original’s popularity, but it struck around until 1995, with Super RBI Baseball on the Super NES and RBI Baseball 96 on the Sega 32X. At this point in time, Tengen had long sold the license over to Time Warner Interactive.
Giantbomb's wiki notes that ESRB saw a listing for an RBI Baseball game coming to XBLA in 2008, with an achievement list and the developer name Six Degrees Games attached to it, but with nothing ever coming out of it.
So, it’s not quite clear when it happened, but it’s quite clear MLB itself now owns the RBI license, and likely have done so for some time now. Considering baseball games stagnated in the past generation to just MLB 2K and MLB: The Show, this is a definite breath of fresh air. Would it be too much to hope that other older baseball franchises, like All-Star Baseball, Baseball Stars, or Bases Loaded, also make their way back to the limelight when this game succeeds? I sincerely hope RBI 14 augurs well for baseball games in the 8th generation of consoles.
